SAMARA OLIVEIRA

INTERVIEW

How did you get into the world of Arts?
My journey in the Visual Arts started when I was 19 years old. During this period, I began to photograph landscapes and to be enchanted by the simplicity of the forms present in the wild nature of the northeastern agreste. I started painting at the age of 22, in a process of discovery through self-taught. Since then, I have dedicated myself to studying and working every day with different media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video art and other media that are used to express my thoughts.

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What do you understand by Fine Arts?
Fine Arts are records of the life of a particular individual or a social group that works to generate thoughts and questions in others, through experiences and memories. The overflow of feelings and emotions experienced finds, in the diversity of languages, a support for the construction of visual poetics. Art becomes a means to contrast subjectivity and exteriority, generating confrontations and sensitive experiences. It is an eternal return to memories during creation. Thus building visual life through clues from the unconscious and pre-consciousness. Thoughts are preconscious, when they are unconscious at a given moment, but not repressed. It is through accessing these stored images that the inexhaustible source of creativity is reached. Diving into the external and internal world turns into works that exercise the imagination. However, the plastic arts, above any theory, is what each one takes for himself, from the experience with the image, object or immersion. Art is the fulfillment of inner need, an overview of the residues of life.

How do you define your Art?
I seek a poetics that has a dialogic relationship with the Abstract Expressionism movement that took place in New York, as well as the expressionist matrix of the historical avant-gardes. Abstract Expressionism reflects the anxiety and violence that the USA was facing in the second half of the 1940s. Starting from sensitive senses such as memory and pain, subjectivity is externalized through supports and languages, transforming lived experiences into non-figurative arts that deal with the inner world. Thus, the paintings are related to the way of painting of American artists after the Second World War. The Action Painting technique, as it became known, is a very gestural painting, in which the paint is thrown directly onto the canvas, through instinctive gestures, in which chance and randomness determine the evolution of the painting. Jackson Pollock, lead author of the technique, said: “The modern artist is working with and expressing an inner world, energy and movement and other inner forces.”

The main theme for me, in fact, is abstraction, which clearly implies the expression of ideas about the spiritual, the unconscious and the human mind. With heavy and coarse coatings of superimposed pigments, I create forms and compositions that cross consciousness through free artistic expression. My paintings, with new structures, are not elements taken by vision, but by the reality of understanding. Through a natural process of abstracting things, abstract art is born as a means of expressing inner images, memories, pain and experiences.

I believe that the creative process is like a state of revelation of personal stories and poetic constructions. Abstraction emerged to create a world of possibilities, from the distillation of the essence of reality.

In sculptures, useful Using clay from the interior of the Atlantic Forest, I create abstract visual forms, with cultural concepts, subjective and psychological aspects. I seek to express and oppose the idealism and moralism of classical art. The main themes of the sculptures are the human figure, the inspirations of tropical landscapes and the silent screams that inhabit each being. The representation of artistic human bodies, through the ages, reflects the culture, always permeating the fleetingness of life. The experience of living in the inhospitable nature of the Atlantic Forest, bathed by large greenish seas, trains the eye and the soul. I seek to transform my sensitivity and deepest feelings into gestures and pictorial freedom, unconditionally used to result in a deep immersion in the sensitive expression of the human mind.
I investigate poetics through drives and responses to the world around me. In short, my paintings are instant records of memories. I try to materialize in art sensations about places and interpretations about moments, as well as thoughts about life situations.

What are your biggest references in the world of Arts?
Although women have excelled in the arts or academia throughout history, the record of their performances was rare. The reference books on History of Art in teaching courses demonstrate this. Thinking about this issue, and as I am a woman from the Northeast, my references for painting are female figures that have marked the visual arts. To enrich the vision and launch great flights of images, I always turn to some artists for the construction of works of art. Some of them are Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)). All-powerful and courageous, who traced paths of bravery and strong recognition. With gestural productions and contrasting colors, these artists created interior landscapes and left us a very rich cultural heritage.
As for the sculptures, I studied Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Camille Claudel (1864-1943), Antony Gormley (1950), Victor Brecheret (1894-1955) and Mark Newman (1962). And for the videos, I investigate the productions of artists like Jesper Just (1974), Bruce Nauman (1941) and others, who used video to communicate internally.
For the construction of artistic works, thinkers, from the classics to the contemporary, are of paramount importance. Some of the literary references are Cecilia Salles, Fayga Ostrower (1920-2001), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Giulio Carlo Argan (1909-1992), David Anfam (1955), Herbert Read (1893-1968), among others. Intellectuals who create a web of subjectivity about art history and creative processes.
Literary works are also key to inspiring and enriching the imagination. Stories such as those of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), nourish the spirit of fantasy and subjective images. Which results in more dynamic creations and with greater depth of feelings.

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What are the main themes used in your works? Why?
The main themes for me are the feminine, the body, the human essence, pain, emotional landscapes and abstractions. As each individual has a body representation that he assumes as his own identity, then, the body is present in the act of creating the work, since it is the body that operates the tool for the transformation of matter. Through clay, I model these bodies from dreams to affect reality. In addition, I seek to dialogue with topics related to Brazilian culture. I realize that I am the result of restlessness and creative impulses, which insist on wanting to appropriate themes related to pain and life. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not choose the theme, the theme chooses me.
 

What are the main techniques used in your work? And which ones do you like to use the most?
My work goes through different media: photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and prints.
To photograph is to record perceptions from nature and contemporary life. In images, edited by Photoshop, I try to assign different meanings and signs to each composition. I performed more than 500 photo essays during that time.
The main techniques I use in my paintings are acrylic, oil and watercolor. In these paintings, I seek to appropriate the materiality of different raw materials and superimpose one color on the other, several times, building layers with atmospheres of sensations and emotions. The colors become fragmented and without aerial perspective and, for each composition, there is almost a state of creative meditation, where all the sensitive senses are awakened. Brush strokes are dripped, brushed, slipped, and applied with many types of brushes or rubbed with fingers or rags. The strokes are lyrical and calligraphic.

In the sculptures, I use clay taken from the Atlantic Forest and transform the material into shapes with lines, volumes, shadows and curvatures that concentrate and crystallize personal emotions and relationships with society. After modeling, the artist hollows out the sculpture and after firing, I paint it with ceramic glaze. After being baked again at a temperature of 1300 ° degrees, she paints the sculptures once more with glass paints, in order to give the pieces an even more artistic and authorial finish. A slow process and a lot of patience and perseverance, which can take months to complete the work.

An instinctive process and the result of studies and research, creativity is inexhaustible, since everything present in society and nature can become art.
In the drawings, I work with pastels and colored oil sticks. I also use industrial materials such as enamel. Material widely used by abstract expressionist artists. By spraying paint on the canvas, I try to weave a chain of perceptive feelings. The colors of the palette are varied, since each color has a different emotional awakening characteristic in the public. And color is something deeply subjective and intertwined with memories, senses or emotions and our feelings.

In the installations, I propose an immersion in the world of subjectivity through contact with the spectator, seeking body movements and dynamics. The installations are made up of videos, paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures.
For the engravings, the process is even deeper; I revisit the greatest pains to bring images without forms and disintegrated with reality. The drawing on the stones and matrices is fast, gestural and almost neurotic. The tension is given by the countless drawings that swell between them. In this sense, art exists as a burning flame that pulses in the veins. In this encounter between drives, gestures, fantasies, memories, spirituality and imagination, action is part of a process of self-knowledge and healing. For me, the medium does not matter, but the intimate communication that each work can generate in the spectator. For, an art must express deep emotions, be conflicting, cause estrangement and finally, make the human being touch the sublime expression of the soul.

What do you seek to convey through your works to the viewer?
Art brings with it experiences that go beyond simple logic. They are in the realm of decodable sensations. Artworks offer the possibility to create unique interpretations and thoughts. It is about an intimate exchange between artist and audience, in which the spectator must use his/her, sensitivity to perceive what art is for him/her. Everything is free, simple and sincere.

I am very committed to the idea of ​​emotional communication. In the paintings, I try to provoke and let the viewer access another level of sensorial, poetic and subjective experience. The pictorial works cause emotional reactions, but also promote the identification of material elements. Audience analysis can be visual or symbolic. The paintings register layers of subjectivities, through direct and blunt means, and speak directly to our interior.

In the sculptures, I want to generate discomfort regarding the unique forms and bring reflections on the situation of Northeastern women, through forms that inhabit my imagination. As the reading of the works can be dependent on the sensations it causes in each of us, I try to establish a border between the real and the imaginary, lighting flames in perception.

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What are the best and biggest experiences in your artistic career?
In 2019, when I was still in the 2nd year of college, I participated in the 51st Annual Arts held by the renowned FAAP-SP. I won the competition in 1st place and my installation work became part of the collection of the Museu de Arte Brasileira. The work, quite political, spoke of the vulnerability of Northeastern women and the causes and effects of trauma generated by patriarchal power. In addition, I was awarded a scholarship at FAAP, where I studied and acquired a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. I was also contemplated in public notices for exhibitions in the state of São Paulo, such as the show about the “Centenary of the 22nd Week”, which will take place at the end of this year 2022. On this occasion, I present poetic works with great loads of energy. I mourned figuration and will exhibit paintings and engravings that propose a new vision of art, based on an innovative aesthetic inspired by the American movements.

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Is there an aspect of protest in your work beyond what is obviously seen? If yes, which one? If not, is there a topic that arouses your desire to protest?
Art, for me, is like revelations of themes of war and conflict, trauma, memories, inhumanity and alienation in the public sphere. Art is political; I try to materialize traumas from the period when I was in the semi desert. I believe that art is pure resistance against the ruling classes and they express the aggressive feelings. My memories are permeated with painful images and when I feel the return of these records, and in search of expressing longings and feelings, my body is taken by energy that makes my fists walk desperately on the screen. Thus creating signs of pictorial protests.
In the sculptures, I work with thoughts about myself and the women of the semi desert. Thinking about the multiple violence that these women suffer, I recreate the female figure with holes and, sometimes, without faces. In these creatures, everything is darkness, poetry and subjectivity. I work always motivated by social issues. I believe that art must have a political attitude, and my gestures come from the reactions provoked by the ills of humanity. But the act of painting and creating art, even in the face of disturbing memories, is an act of protest, or as Lisette Lagnado would say: “All art is political”.

Are you interested in doing a traveling exhibition? If yes, how do you envision this exhibition? Could you tell me which topic you would like to address?
For a traveling exhibition, there are several options, as I work with different media. With paintings, I could create an exhibition room with abstract works that speak of interior landscapes, dreams and feelings. In these works, she would recreate invented and new landscapes, with great delicacy, femininity and protest. This would be an exhibition about emotional abstract landscapes with images that came from experiences from my Mossoró roots and my perspective on society.

For a montage, it would be possible to include both paintings made on cotton canvas and chassis, as well as paintings on paper constructed with watercolor and enamel and framed. In this exhibition, he would also create paintings of various dimensions, creating a certain dynamism. Despite approaching the theme of emotional landscapes, the paintings would also be different from each other, bringing a lot of diversity of images. However, it is possible to create a mixed exhibition with paintings and sculptures. In these sculptural pieces, he would create a series of imagined beings with reflections on women.

In this way, sculptures and paintings produced by the hand and vision of a woman from Mossoró would expand the observer's understanding of the northeast, as well as provoke and emphasize an art production based on an abstract perspective. As I am also a photographer, I would include some photos of female essays and landscapes, resulting in a very diverse and rich exhibition of techniques that would have several possibilities of reading.
Where do you want to go as an artist?
As a visual artist, I have studied for eight years and only at the beginning of the year 2022, I am able to professionalize myself in the area. A very young and promising career. I am always looking for new themes and compositions, international artist residencies are in my plans for 2023. In addition, I am studying with the artist follow-up group with the team at Ateliê 397, a place well known for mentoring artists and promoting exhibitions in Sao Paulo-SP.

I want to continue mentoring children in the community and soon I want to improve my working conditions, renting a bigger studio to be even freer to create. In the sculptures, started in 2022, I am already working with a locksmith who promises to give an even more professional finish to the works. I am always reading, working and studying. I want to take the art produced by a Northeastern woman to different countries, produce new knowledge about Brazilian women and, thus, deconstruct prejudices. I want to achieve many things and I certainly have a creative flame pulsing in my fists. A compulsion to create, the result of emotional crises. For me, art is also like wine; it matures and improves with time and work.