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拍品专文
"I am a conceptual carnivalesque," Beatriz Milhazes once explained with regard to her delectably colorful paintings, which riff on 'high' and 'low' with equal aplomb.(1) A mid-career artist who first broke through at the 1995 Carnegie International and later represented Brazil at the fiftieth Venice Biennale (2003), Milhazes belongs to the generation of artists who invested painting with postmodern critique and new relevance in the 1980s. Her paintings nod to historical sources in Henri Matisse and the Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral, for example, but like her contemporaries Philip Taaffe, Takashi Murakami and Julio Galán she insinuates connections between hyperfigurative pictorial elements and decorative abundance, linked organically through all-over patterning and saturated color. The complexity of color and its connotative reach are hallmarks of Milhazes's canvases, and her deft calibration of chromatic design marks works such as the present Untitled with keen visual and conceptual sophistication.
Untitled belongs to what José Augusto Ribeiro has called the artist's "Hispanic period" of the mid-1990s, during which she recast the iconography of Latin America's colonial past into images characteristically laden with religious and feminine allusion. "In general, her works of 1993-1997 are indeed heavily charged, dark, and even figurative," Ribeiro continues, noting "the profusion of jewels, ornaments, lace and lace edgings, roses, and ruffles in some of these works."(2) Strings of pearls crisscross the surface of Untitled, connecting a pattern of roses that frames and radiates from the pale-pink, suggestively vaginal cavity at the center of the painting. Here in this innermost space, Milhazes deftly synthesizes multiple layers of meaning: decoratively-patterned brown ribbons, which recall a priestly stole, overlap with lace doilies stamped in pink and turquoise-blue, mingling ecclesiastical and highly eroticized feminine motifs across the rose-bedecked surface.
Since the 1990s, Milhazes has built her paintings through a laborious process based on monotype and collage, in which many of the patterns are painted first on plastic sheets and then transposed onto the canvas. The layering of color and design elements is both a metaphor for her stylistically hybrid paintings and a means of elaborating a complex picture surface out of repetitive and superpositioned motifs. In this way, Milhazes's paintings become a palimpsest of overlaid pigments and cascading imagery--a rich metaphor for the mesmerizing and hyperbolic assemblage of femininity depicted in Untitled.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) B. Milhazes, quoted in Claudia Laudanno, "Beatriz Milhazes," Art Nexus 7, no. 68, March-May 2008, 145.
2) J. A. Riberio, "In the Sway of the Bossas: "Waves,"" Art Nexus 3, no. 54, October-December 2004, 80.
Untitled belongs to what José Augusto Ribeiro has called the artist's "Hispanic period" of the mid-1990s, during which she recast the iconography of Latin America's colonial past into images characteristically laden with religious and feminine allusion. "In general, her works of 1993-1997 are indeed heavily charged, dark, and even figurative," Ribeiro continues, noting "the profusion of jewels, ornaments, lace and lace edgings, roses, and ruffles in some of these works."(2) Strings of pearls crisscross the surface of Untitled, connecting a pattern of roses that frames and radiates from the pale-pink, suggestively vaginal cavity at the center of the painting. Here in this innermost space, Milhazes deftly synthesizes multiple layers of meaning: decoratively-patterned brown ribbons, which recall a priestly stole, overlap with lace doilies stamped in pink and turquoise-blue, mingling ecclesiastical and highly eroticized feminine motifs across the rose-bedecked surface.
Since the 1990s, Milhazes has built her paintings through a laborious process based on monotype and collage, in which many of the patterns are painted first on plastic sheets and then transposed onto the canvas. The layering of color and design elements is both a metaphor for her stylistically hybrid paintings and a means of elaborating a complex picture surface out of repetitive and superpositioned motifs. In this way, Milhazes's paintings become a palimpsest of overlaid pigments and cascading imagery--a rich metaphor for the mesmerizing and hyperbolic assemblage of femininity depicted in Untitled.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) B. Milhazes, quoted in Claudia Laudanno, "Beatriz Milhazes," Art Nexus 7, no. 68, March-May 2008, 145.
2) J. A. Riberio, "In the Sway of the Bossas: "Waves,"" Art Nexus 3, no. 54, October-December 2004, 80.