Suiá Ferlauto at WARM

Artist: Suiá Ferlauto

Exhibition title: Drops

Venue: WARM, São Paulo, Brazil

Date: October 15 – November 20, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and WARM, São Paulo

“To see where it goes”

It’s common in artistic creation the usage of games to explain existing rules and then depart to interpretive possibilities on an artwork. However, sometimes, it seems more productive to use the notion of joking. In this context we introduced a certain malice, where not everything is what it seems to be, or also the logic of the game rules that can be bent or even broken.

In her process of creation, Suiá Ferlauto truly brings the spirit of those who plays in the studio. Scraps, leftovers, canvas structures that arrive dismantled at her place can be rearranged and activated in a way that will never be hold in its original direction as a basic structure of an stretched screen.

Not allowing them to be simple canvas, Suiá paint directly onto the wood, building a soft narrative of movements and colors that appears and disappears as they move from one piece to another. They are placed against the wall or suggest, but never become, a picture. Paintings or sculptures? This is not so much the case because the central attitude is in the making, in the reconstruction of gestures of what never was but with full of intentions to be one of those options. The finding of this process is the “joke”, that could be scrawls that someone does on a sheet of paper while talking on the phone, but the results, however, is the crystallization of what appeared randomly in the initial state of creation.

Similarly, the act of painting the back, is primary an act of joking. Perhaps this joke has a similar meaning to experiment or research, but she does with no hypothesis or with a group of proposition, and far less a thesis. The conclusions of all this game is the pleasure by doing “wrong” things. Poor canvas, school supplies and materials produced to kids and amateurs are frequently used by Suiá. As the artist told me during a conversation: even before act over a screen, it is already so full of things. Flip the screen is like spending some time and enjoy the pleasure of doing something simply for the pleasure of seeing “where it gonna go”.

The same is seen in works on paper. But these – when Suiá shows me in her studio – reminded me of origami games of my childhood. She folds a sheet of paper several times; touch one side of the paper on the ink. When opening there are color balls, that stretches, interrupt and multiply themselves by the rules of the paper. It is a gesture that has its own sensuality, but also is an indifferent pastime.

In all these works the colors plays as a shy protagonist: When exposed, the color also hides; a kind of shyness, when the color try to prove itself, it is seen without any shame. It suggests a game to our look, which seeks to find it in places where they are revealed, and so emphasize the “stuffs” that are hidden and at the same time that gives structure: woods, bending a paper or back of a screen.

The DROPS are debauched and averse.

Ricardo Sardenberg