Por: Seffrin
THE SEAMLESS PIETRINE TUNIC CHECCACCI
In the successive series of paintings, serigraphs, sculptures or multiples of Pietrina Checcacci we are confronted with the beautiful alliance between technical mastery and the art of loving, something bordering on what Carlos Drummond de Andrade knew, and with underlying irony, in the poem ” “. Sensual passion that in Pietrina may eventually turn into visceral and agonizing, in this case perhaps closer to the poetry of Jorge de Lima. Which is to say that Pietrina’s plastic work sometimes develops in turbulent waters, in eruptive territories, in spaces of unexpected and hidden splendours. It is no coincidence, as you may conclude, that your universe remains so close to poetry and poets. And in erecting body and city in a single metaphysical landscape, Pietrina ends up taking a path not only aesthetic but also ethical, on the verge of the many scientific discoveries that in equal measure fascinate and weaken us.
In each line or chromatic scale, in each allegorical or simply humorous suggestion, Pietrina creates his profuse forms that now self-refer, now unfold from a single proposal, ancestral memory and obsessive work. In the traces of a famous title by Roland Barthes, it is as if the artist walked always and without rest in search of the fragments of a loving speech. Variations on the same subject have, over the years, changing and growing, have kept it incorruptible and adept at an art performed without moorings, fears or eventual leaks. And of course, this well-nourished and dynamic universe, driven by the roots of the symbols of living, loving, and creating, is a crop of few artists.
Now, in another no less telluric unfolding of her vast work, and as before, in the series “The Creation Today” of 2007, Pietrina again evokes our genesis in a rather unusual and disturbing way. As in the previous series of tenuous roses or strange faces, the dramatic accent became more striking. Suspects suspended in uterine shadows, sentient beings in unlikely solitude, beginning and end of twisted terrestrial pyramids. And here the approximation is with one of the seminal titles of another great poet, Cecília Meireles – Solombra. Sun and shadow or, perhaps, the nameless. As if, when moving away from the sensuality and eroticism that made her famous in the 70’s and 80’s, Pietrina was suddenly confronted with a more rugged and enigmatic world. And it is a strange world to the human parties that interweaves in these screens full of light and shadow. Like tattoos of an underworld, without before and after, at the mercy of chance, fading into distances. Says Cecilia: “There are a thousand faces in the earth: and now I can not remember one at all.” A world of essences and little transparency, which is not known inside or outside, and without any comfort.
As at the end of the series “Roses” in 2009, DNA as a reflex or duplicity (liquid mirrors), possible fetuses or clouds suggesting human anatomy, rainbow or amoebas, all without the veils of allegory, kind of wandering loving or catharsis. In the insulation of the body in the landscape, in its exile, we have the blood that becomes mist and shadow. Wombs, ova, mountains, waters, cloths, fruits,
planets, stars, celestial pulsations, without beginning or end. They preponderate black and white in these unexpected nebulae, primordial forms of the cosmos or human genesis, widely analyzed or suggested in everything that Pietrina has composed ever since. Blood red, black and gray are colors stabilized in their incessant plastic mobilities, from the fossilized body cuts of the late 70’s or even earlier, from the Evaterra phase, around 1973. In the beginning was the pop, the photographic mood, the connection to a certain expressionism, and the brief political commitment, inhabited here and there by the playful, the humorous and even the kitch of mass culture that gradually disappeared in favor of a dense human commitment, full and sovereign. And it was this human commitment that led her to an exuberant (and exalted) erotic sensuality still little studied by critics.
An anonymous world (of generally faceless bodies), created in pieces and revealed the most, on the way to abstraction, in the winding of cracks, folds and moats, angularities, a suggestion of volumes that eventually ended up in three-dimensionality. In 1977, in an interview with Antonio Hohlfeldt, Pietrina admitted that there is in his painting a sculptural sense of masses and volumes, that “inevitable sculptural dimension” that Roberto Pontual captured in 1978. However, here and now, the artist reaches zero of their research, a lesson in the colors of almost cruel serenity. The faint pink, fleeting gray, and certain deep blues from the series of “erotically” erotic roses already heralded delicate superimpositions of galaxies, black holes, the confines of the universe pulsating within each of us, in what we are in our bodies and in our light. Yes, as one other poet, Lêdo Ivo, once said, “we are bodies, we are our bodies”, whether in the landscape of the body or in the body that suggests it, in the flower of the skin. An inaugural landscape because all these discoveries are immediately transposed or translated into an art that manifests itself cohesively, as a vital continuum, a seamless tunic.
André Seffrin
Rio, July 2013.
