Mira Schendel: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo

Because of her use of simplified geometric forms to summon forth poetic feelings and sensuality, the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919-88; born Myrrha Dagmar entitle in Switzerland) has often been linked to the Neo-concrete art unfolded in Brazil as an offspring of and reaction to international Constructivism, placing her upon an equal footing with like pioneers as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. With remarkable consistency, Schendel strove to reach a point where her works verg upon sameness without being arid or repetitive. As she one time stated in a letter to a critic, she was interested in the notion of "possibility" rather than "necessity" provided by dint of art, with an ultimate goal (paraphrasing Haroldo de Campos)--of "emptying of the form."

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This exhibition, entitled "Continuum amorfo," not absented the artist's works from the '60 end the '80s as a dialogue among the materials she used to bring into view her works, the forms she created, and her inner life. It have the appearances that what most interested Schendel was the fragility and fluidity--or perhaps vulnerability--of all of those constituents Her preoccupation with presence-in-absence and the centrality of the void may have been influenced by means of Asian philosophies like Buddhism, to which she alludes in the series of gouache-and-charcoal drawings titled "Mais ou menos frutas" (More or Les Fruits), 1983 whose simplified forms of fruits are depicted as detached from a vine or string exhibited by an "elastic" horizontal line crossing the white page. Perhaps surprisingly, these pieces recall traditional Chinese calligraphy from one side their reliance on controlled notwithstanding immediate gestures as ways of searching for broader meaning in art and its communication of life, without giving up the attempt to make a distinctive personal mark.

Marks, in fact, take upon many forms in Schendel's art. In "Droguinhas" ("insignificant things" or "little nothings"), a series of spatial works upon paper from 1964, they appear as action s of coiling, braiding, and knotting. The forms have a "concrete" neighborhood yet they are nonutilitarian and abstract; their control is neither refined nor rarefied. In a series of untitled monotypes, also from the '60 Schendel's marks appear as stains and scratches, created by the agency of transferring ink drawings from a piece of glass to rice paper. In these, the delicacy of line is emphasized without direct interaction with the fragile, tissue-like paper: The ink simply drip bloods through. What occasionally disturbs that Zen feeling of corporeal relationship between the artist and her work is the use of words and alphabetic characters inscribed by hand or written with Letraset, which springs in an extraneous graphic perceive that seems out of sync with the delicacy of the image.

Schendel turn backed to a stricter geometry in her late works, for example, the series "sarratos" (Sluts) 1987 in which she assembled narrow pieces of black-painted copse with rectangular, near-white pieces treated as "canvas." Organized in a minimalist fashion that stresse materiality, these assemblages stood in sharp contrast to her visceral earlier works. They remind us that Constructivism at its best is a Great Utopia to which art that aims at reaching the quintessence of self will perhaps always return

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