Por: Jacob Klintowitz
Pietrina Checcacci: Rationality and Eros
Jacob Klintowitz 11/20/1981
Pietrina Checcacci’s painting reaches the maturity of her proposal and she can now present us, with subtlety and coherence, her theme and her iconography (Applied Art Gallery, São Paulo). The subject of Pietrina Checcacci is the human body and the possibilities of visions of its parts, its confrontations and its contrasts. In this way, the artist uses the subject body to patiently decode the approximate view of its parts. It is in this perspective that painting stands and its further development will be linked to this basic question: what is the human body when faced with critical detachment and what are its formal possibilities?
Pietrina’s gaze is strange. The body seen through a magnifying glass, with its surprises, the carnations (incidentally, the title of this exhibition), its landscape. This look is a meditative look, away from the ideological convention, establishing a consideration of cold and distant character. What serves as a dialogue for the formal nature of the painting, detailed full of curves and approximations with this baroque object, made of meats and folds.
As a pictorial treatment, the artist prefers to work with a single color, with few shades and nuances. The background, preferably neutral in relation to the basic shape, helps to give the visuality of the work a poster idea. The painting with the monochromatic body, highlighted in detail, located in the center of the space, the neutral background, all lead unequivocally to the treatment of “out door” gigantography. The difference is the absence of reticles. There is no other artist in Brazil who has taken this subject and his consideration so coldly distant. On this side, it certainly comes close to the detailed literary descriptions made by Sade, Bataille, Swift, Peter, Weis, Robe-Grillet, etc. An art of observation, discovery, cataloging and election of prototype cases.
The counterpart that this exhibition offers is Pietrina’s sculpture. Also this sculpture is dedicated to the same subject, the human body. But volume and bronze, coupled with tactile pleasure, radically modify the artist’s perspective. Pietrina Checcacci’s sculpture is sensual, playful, delightful. I believe it serves to exercise the artist in her greatest possibilities, complementing the game of understanding the subject. Which explains the sensuality and humor of the three-dimensional. On the one hand, the libertine coldness; on the other side the sensuality of pleasure. Rationality and Eros, historically oppositions. This leads us to believe in this dual activity, painting and sculpture, as an aesthetic integration necessary for the understanding of the artist’s last game: the opposition of two principles, the visual enigma, the steps offered to the public, the elaboration of contrasts and situations boundaries and demarcated.
