TEXTS

ENTREVER - Priscila Mainieri

 

In Entrever (Glimpses), her most recent series of artworks, Priscila Mainieri presents chromographic plots superimposed on an intelligent, sensitive play on full and empty spaces that yields mollifying, hypnotic invitations to live the fantasy.  

If in fact all achievements hold an unpredictable nothingness that changes everything, as Bergson wants us to believe, then the nothingnesses that pervade Priscila’s paintings have a transforming potential manifest as an invisible content regulating the form of her continents: in Entrever, nothing is everything, and emptiness holds plenitude, the silence of music.  

As noted, the series in reference is painted in watercolors, a genre whose nature and transparency require specific technical procedures: it is presupposed that the substrate – the surface painted on, which to other paints is for covering and on which textures are preserved – gives off luminosity. Thus, in watercolors, it’s the paper that shines, that holds the light. Priscila researches and experiments with different types of artisanal paper from the West and from the East—even whole sheets—and syntactically incorporates their materiality into layers of colors. Here and there, very balanced, she leaves parts of the paper blank, full of nothing, like passages used to flee to the other side. She carefully doses the superimposition of numerous uniform and intact watery layers, whose intersections multiply forms, figures and backgrounds.

In Entrever, the controlled superimposition of interstices suggests the whole from the parts, and the resulting images bring certain things to mind: networks, with their representations and semantic ramifications; laces, textiles, and amoebas and like structures, as those examined on high school microscope slides. At times, they resemble stained glass; yet other times, they verge on fantastic landscapes, forests, trunks and treetops, as suggested by the opaque treatment of intervals that define and are defined by the holes. Everything results in a skillfully arranged chromatic entanglement integrated into areas, territories, archipelagoes: cartographs.         

From another angle, the full and empty spaces build habitable spatial dimensions, whose structures seem ordered by a very personal logic, a liquid, resilient, mazelike architecture. However, this logic doesn’t conflict with intuition and spontaneity.  Quite the contrary! It fuses with them, and this commingling opens up cracks for travels into fantasy.  

Thus, steering through the crevices, lights and luminosities of her painting, Priscila constructs empty spaces and fills them with nothing. Actually, producing these vacancies leads to an excellent find, because it offers the observer these layers for him to fill with his own fabulations.

Alveolae have both the potential to create the illusion of depth on that side of the frame, as the ability to project themselves on this side, onto the space before the paper surface. This densification, as encompassing as voile unveiling the spectator’s way back, is more than just an encouragement for him to proceed on this path of furtive movement, guised as… a miniaturized scientist crossing through membranes as in the Fantastic Voyage? …a cave explorer as in Journey to the Center of the Earth? …a Kafka mole scuttling through underground galleries in The Burrow?  …a mouth-watering mouse gazing into the holes of The Big Cheese.

Indeed, the nothings of Priscila Mainieri’s paintings are suggestive and transforming: they change everything.

 

Waldemar Zaidler, June 2019

Forms of superimpositions emerge between dark and light shades, opaque and transparent colors, and layers of color both on top and underneath, that suggest coexistence, transposition and transformation.

In maturing her creative process, Priscila Mainieri develops the substance she works with: color and light – they appear on the paper, built up in superimposed layers alongside textures, rendered dense by shaded layers. The difficult task of creating with watercolors, together with the ability to glimpse paper as light, finds balance between plastic and graphics.

Researching cultural and technical references, supports and materials, Priscila embarks on her pursuit of objectives. In her Entrever (Glimpse) series, she builds a space for imagination, between Plutarch and Plato, between India and Persia, through the latticework of mashrabiyas and of other decorative structures. She keeps at her work of creating and gazing, without being gazed on.

 

Rosely Nakagawa

 

Priscila’s stencil works reveal the path she followed, steered by my guidelines, starting with my suggestion that she should preserve white regions of the paper, and leading to an important discussion about watercolor painting.

Very dedicated to her studies and sharing her studio space, Priscila has always focused her energy on technical guidance and art history. She studied the technique of several artists, like Raphael, and Asian schools, particularly Persian, Chinese and Japanese.  Priscila showed a predilection for sacred Muslim geometry. What started as a simple exercise, gradually turned into a series of works on paper, with a line that explained its research.    

Geometry, together with the study of Alhambra art, reinforced the importance of gaining sharper discernment of the mirrored forms and of keeping surfaces untouched, to keep the paper pure in form and color, following the Chinese art concept of “non-painting,” in which paper becomes a protagonist.  

Priscila’s contact with Asian paper and with Indian ink brushes and stones led her to experiment with a type of paper that completely absorbs watercolors. It’s worth mentioning that absorption is a characteristic of Asian painting that enables both sides of the completed artwork to be contemplated. This process, together with the theories of continuity and juxtaposition of Chevreul color, resulted in the improved transparency and consequent richer color of her work.

 

Rubens Matuck