For a long time, the connection between Art and Nature has been an important part of the processes of artistic creation. It allows us to understand about the ways in which these fields of knowledge operate a kind of harmony that can well be understood from the idea of mirroring. As the play of images and lights yielded by interlaced mirrors, the plurality of elements available to Art and Nature to make themselves visible and therefore recognized; present and therefore necessary to some extent; survivors, since they must diverge only in the exact dose of their present time, making us understand the prospects of this relationship as equally lasting and thought-provoking.
Furthermore, the artistic work of Patricia Rebello frames and matures itself in the amplitude of the reflexes between Art and Nature, as I witnessed in the last years. Her trajectory comes from her affection for the life near the rapids of the river that is named after the city of Piracicaba (SP) in which she lives, which has had an important presence in the arrangement of her daily landscape through her current phase in which the artist collects visual references of animal or botanical specimens and combine them with drawing, collage, modeling, and other processes to systematically explore mutant forms that inhabit other bodies. Therefore, her collections of mutant elements of nature highlights how contemporariness is constructed.
The series created by her have in common a precious trait, they are technically impeccable. Plastic and compositely experimenting, to combine her research in visual sources from the internet or from old publications stored in her atelier as if they were scientific research. In a significant part of these series as in “Quimeras” or “Unfolding” we find the speed of transformation of the organic elements represented graphically and poetically challenged by her in the clash with the urgencies of urban life in big cities. They are meticulous compositions whose refinement is established by juxtaposed layers of information. Over time, this growing database of visual information starts to support the possibility of a morphological imagination appropriate to the artist’s work and indicates both her source of feedback, self-criticism and longevity.
In Patricia’s work, the materiality of which the artistic object is made is linked to Nature by means of the following layered structure: it is not the plants or the insects and the animals themselves to be presented, but their iconographic sense, as a representation of classified and categorized specimen, a cataloged image that is made known through the unfolded register. It establishes, as Paul Virilio (1999) indicates, another time of appearance and truth, a situation that is made possible by means of mirroring.
In this combined relation between ‘index’ and ‘thing’ the artist carefully explores the plastic composition and through the research of these cataloged types ends up finding a more artivist aspect that claims the elements of harmful action on the environment and the natural landscape. The series that best highlights this interest is “Resilience” in which, Patricia seeks to discuss the ideas of resistance and overcoming that is proper to living systems.
However, the attention to the descriptive character of scientific language ends up establishing its artistic acuity since its persistent compositive and creative strategy promotes areas of great blurring between what one imagines as final form and the one that presents itself as a compositional part that generates that form. This intriguing play of similar compositional forms is in the whole process, but can be well represented by the series “Insectum” and its insect-jewels that recombine butterflies, beetles and other insects to parts of plants, small jewels, as well as everyday objects.
Nature, in its complex structure, creates systems to adapt itself, in which it establishes Arts in its revisions over time. Therefore, it becomes possible to read this combination of connected universes in which the distinction or limits tend to blur and to approximate forces of the movement that generates themselves.
The work of Patricia Rebello is clearly based on such universes, stands on fruitful ground and establishes itself in a rhythm of plastic unfolding, poetic flourishing and possible physiologies, in addition to focusing attention to the aesthetic rejuvenation that can encompass the entire operation within the artistic system. She has dedicated herself to the study and experimental manipulation of shapes and meanings of the indexes conveyed by the Natural Sciences in the contemporary visuality, Patrícia is also the creator of other logics and ecologies for the elements that interest her as an artist.
Sylvia Furegatti
July, 2018
PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo FAU-USP (2007)
Director of the Museum of Visual Arts MAV – Unicamp.