Através

The title "Through" of the exhibition by Brazilian artist Mariana Palma evokes the passage through the looking glass, as imagined by Lewis Carroll in his famous novel "Alice in Wonderland". 

In this unprecedented exhibition, held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, the mirrors are the works' transparencies, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for self-discovery and confrontation with the unconscious. 

It is an exploration of the passage from a rational world to a more absurd and illogical one, where the usual rules are inverted and man could - perhaps - free himself from reality. 

The artist confronts us with Einstein's relativity, in which time and space no longer offer fixed points of reference. What remains stable? Just the thread of his thoughts. Mariana invites us to penetrate the meanders of Alice's consciousness, in other words, "somewhere between my memory and my imagination". 

His compositions, whether in his paintings, his photographic installations on veils or his projections, are made up of recognizable themes, but put together in this way, they create a new world that stimulates the imagination.

The exhibition is breathtaking. The artist has explored the most challenging spaces in Oscar Niemeyer's architecture - the Eye, the staircase and the lower rooms of the Eye's downward curve - to give us a master class on her vision of nature, a decidedly contemporary baroque style that will open up the widest possible space for visitors' imaginations.

Marc Pottier
Curator

Brazilian artist Mariana Palma represents a powerful and promising generation of women who are conquering an ever-increasing space in contemporary art. In a poetic way, she subtly evokes nature in a way that is as beautiful as it is unique. 

To house his solo show at MON, the iconic Eye was chosen as the main exhibition space, which will certainly make the visitor's experience even more intense and interesting. 

Upon entering the immersion proposed by the artist, the public will encounter not only works of art, but also the possibility of perceiving new meanings. Her work, with its lightness and sophistication, involves the viewer.

The exhibition "Through" evokes the idea of crossing layers, fabrics, images or time. Her works flow, they carry movement. It's a crossing that doesn't hurt, but reveals. The feminine gaze and sensitivity are present at all times.

Each exhibition held by MON in the Eye space is unique. What the public sees is always the sum of the talent of a great artist with a unique and dazzling exhibition space, considered in itself a work of art, designed by the master Oscar Niemeyer.

Over more than two decades, several important exhibitions have been held there. However, each of them takes on a unique character, with a lot of drama and strength, as is the case now with Mariana Palma.

Grandiose, the exhibition goes beyond the confines of the Eye and invades other spaces in the Museum, such as the staircases and the rooms of the Tower, proposing an even greater challenge. The artist invites visitors to immerse themselves in her work. Enjoy.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

After her participation in the exhibition "Afinidades II - Elas!" at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) in 2022 and 2023, and her installation "Transparências" on the trees in the Museum's gardens as part of the "MON sem Paredes" project, Mariana Palma returns with a solo exhibition at the Eye. It's like a mini-retrospective, in which the public will be able to discover 19 canvases covering the years 2008 to 2025 and two large installations: "Fluir", in the Eye, and another (untitled), on the stairs of the tower. Finally, a series of five projections in one of the rooms of the tower leading to the Eye will show a final angle of a complex work, whose central theme is nature, which invites the public to cross over, to mentally go to the other side of existence to meet (their) dream.

Dream and existence

"The title of the exhibition, 'Through', has to do with this idea of crossing - layers, fabrics, images, time. It's a word that carries movement and a certain lightness, a crossing that doesn't hurt, but reveals. I think she synthesizes well this game between what is seen and what is insinuated in my works," says Mariana Palma. 

The title "Através" also evokes the passage through the looking glass, as imagined by Lewis Carroll in his famous novel "Alice in Wonderland". In this MON exhibition, the mirrors are the 'transparencies' of the works - it can be interpreted as a metaphor for self-discovery and confrontation with the unconscious. It is an exploration of the passage from a rational world to a more absurd and illogical one, where the usual rules are inverted and man could - perhaps - free himself from reality. Mariana Palma confronts us with Einstein's relativity, in which time and space no longer offer fixed points of reference. What remains stable? Just "the thread of my thoughts". Mariana invites us to penetrate the meanders of Alice's consciousness, in other words, "somewhere between my memory and my imagination". His compositions, whether in his paintings, his photographic installations on veils or his projections, are made up of recognizable themes, but put together in this way, they create a new world that stimulates the imagination.

The "Transparencies" series

Mariana is one of the great artists who have explored transparency in their work. Among these artists is Francis Picabia, known for his "transparencies" of the 1920s, superimposed images inspired by ancient painting. In 2016-2017, with "L'observatoire de la lumière", through a play of colors, projections, reflections, transparencies and contrasts, both internal and external, Daniel Buren showed Frank Gehry's Vuitton Foundation building in Paris in a new light. Mariana uses the images with which she has been composing for many years, leaves and flowers of all ages, elements pushed by the tides, fabrics and tiles that she superimposes. Although perspective is not her theme, the space of her works remains profound. As the different images she stages, which slide over each other, have no apparent connection or logic, their encounter raises enigmas that we try to solve. Automatism of the unconscious? Applying the poetic principle of rhyme to visual forms? Mariana's "Transparencies", made up of intersecting figures, are an illustration of this approach to mental mechanics with the effect of memory and wear and tear. They are imbroglios of pirated images with a botticelliangrace.

The artist

Mariana Palma's "Transparencies" series communicates the sensation that the artist creates on her canvases. In an installation presented in a group of trees in front of the MON entrance for the "MON without Walls" project in 2022 and today on the stairs of the Museum tower, the viewer is invited to participate and see themselves in the midst of the scenes produced. In addition to the juxtapositions achieved through composition and the distance between the fabrics, the audience becomes another element of the work. The path created by and between the fabrics opens up paths and invitations to access new perceptions and visions of the same work, which blends in with the viewer and the space. 

In the "waterfall" (the artist didn't actually name the installation) that cascades down the floors of the Eye tower, in the central space of the staircase, there is a cataract of still lifes that parade from top to bottom, creating vertigo and contributing to the overall mystery of this exhibition. To further confuse the issue, the artist extinguished all the colors to keep only blue, turning this series into a vertical flow that seems to suck up the entire history of art and, without a doubt, as a poetic and harsh wink to the effects of climate change.

Nature

On the central theme of her work, the artist confides: "Nature has always been very central to my work, right from the start. Even when I wasn't directly painting flowers or natural elements, there was a relationship with the organic, with growth, with the body as landscape. But it was in the 2000s, with the watercolors, that this presence of nature intensified. Then, in more recent photographs and paintings, it came through even more strongly - but no longer as a literal representation, but as poetic matter. Dried leaves, fruits, animals, lichens, dust, everything comes in as a repertoire that speaks of life and death, of transformation". 

"Fluir", the centerpiece of the exhibition 

"The work 'Fluir' has a very special place in this exhibition. It was a turning point, almost a dress rehearsal for what was to come. In it, I place two overlapping fabrics in front of a box with water and mirrors, which forms a kind of perpendicular light box - a cinema inside out - creating an image from the reflection of the sparkle, which is always moving. It's as if it's breathing, and the light that emanates from her takes over the entire vault of the Museum, guiding the exhibition.

She ended up becoming the center of the exhibition, not just physically, but conceptually as well. From there, I organized the other works as developments - some quieter, others more intense, all in dialogue with this idea of image as apparition. I thought of each section of the show as a sensory environment, which the visitor passes through - as the title already suggests. Everything reveals itself little by little, like diving into a fabric and finding other layers, other landscapes," explains Mariana Palma. 

Vanitas 

With a strong reference to vanitas, a style of painting produced between the 16th and 17th centuries in which the compositions sought to prove the transience of life, mixing symbols of ephemerality and death, this installation on the stairs and the 19 paintings in the Olho room explore this space of present and posthumous memory. Mariana Palma creates unique pictorial spaces, constructed by juxtaposing elements from distant families. On the large canvases in saturated colors, tiles coexist with foliage, theater curtains with flowers, printed fabrics, draped and frayed. Natural and artificial elements create unlikely hybrids. The result is unexpectedly harmonious and enigmatic compositions that, by causing a certain strangeness, invite the viewer to take the time to observe. Contemplation reveals genetic clues. The grandeur, the drama, the emotional exuberance, the vitality, the construction of movement and the use of contrasting textures and luxurious materials reveal the dialogue with the baroque painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, evoking reflections on sensuality, the ephemerality of beauty and the bombardment of images today. The use of pure colors is reminiscent of Flemish painters, while the subtle perspectival effects suggest a mastery of Renaissance lessons.

"Things" take power

Mariana Palma revolutionized the notion of still life and the evocative power of the objects she portrays. This genre re-emerged after a millennium of eclipse, during which things were no longer portrayed for their own sake, but always at the service of religion or political power. It was at the dawn of modern capitalism that painters, particularly Flemish ones, began to depict "commodities". They made "things" the stars of their paintings, without referring to their use by characters, religious or otherwise. They regained power. The French painter Chardin established himself as a master of the genre in the 18th century, giving it its letters of nobility.

But the term remains, and its connotation masks the fact that immovable objects can easily inspire dreams, imagination, action or doubt. More than a fruit basket or a butcher's stall, objects are witnesses to times of opulence, reminders of our mortal condition. In her still lifes and vanitas, Mariana Palma adds other dimensions. The transparencies in her paintings add a virtual third dimension, which she materializes even more clearly in her floating projection or print-on-veil installations.

A mannerist and spiritual work

In a small room in the MON tower, five projections are presented. They are flowers, each one on its own, in vibrant colors, with stems practically devoid of foliage, the base of which we can't see. Are they on the ground or in a vase? We'll never know. We won't know the context either, because they stand out in the darkness. The only element that breaks the seriousness of this staging is the wind that makes them vibrate. They become almost human, both in their size and in their strong, impartial presence, each one unique. These powerful videos evoke the extremes of human emotion and the experience of consciousness. The proximity to the staircase installation can also lead us to think about birth and death, themes often present in the artist's work. Here, she expands time and explores the movements of human consciousness with a sense of the sublime that seems inspired by Renaissance painters. In an incredible feat, the almost nothingness of this "animated still life" becomes a whole, perhaps metaphorically showing us the pulse of life. We can't escape basic questions: what's going on? There will be no answer, no narrative. Mariana doesn't tell a story that can be written as a short story: she creates sequences of moving images - rather than furniture. Each one is a complete whole, like a poem or a piece of music.

The Baroque 

What we call baroque is irregular, singular, bizarre. The artifice gains an autonomy it didn't have before. By analyzing the way in which the Baroque image was constructed, we discover not the way in which reality actually appears, but the way in which all images of things, even natural and sensory ones, are constructed as sets, according to principles that are not those of the structure of the thing represented, but those of image-making, so much so that the very world in which we live seems to dissolve into a series of images that correspond to nothing other than them. This is one of the sensations that visitors will have at the MON when they visit this exhibition that embraces the volumes of the Eye and the stairs of the tower that lead to it.

Baroque philosophy enables this knowledge of the fundamentally illusory nature of the world, thanks to which we can rationally perceive the need to seek our salvation in an act that, in turn, no longer admits of rational justification.

The baroque critique of appearances restores them to themselves. An entirely new game opens up, where these appearances produce their effects, perpetually referring to each other on their own level, without claiming the power to manifest anything beyond themselves. There are a thousand possibilities of other appearances that this baroque game of images evokes with the thousand effects that its game constantly produces. Isn't it this philosophical pleasure of knowing appearances for themselves, through the play of their construction, of their complex mutual references, that ultimately characterizes the work of the great Baroque artists?

"I was hooked on the Baroque universe from an early age - both the European and our own, from Minas Gerais. I've always been struck by this excess, this drama and, at the same time, this delicacy of detail, of light, of superimposition," Mariana adds. "My relationship with the Baroque is less like a direct reference and more like an atmosphere. I'm interested in this construction of excess, in the tension between the visible and the invisible, between the sublime and the grotesque. The Baroque taught me to think of the image as something that overflows - that doesn't contain itself. And this appears in my works in the details, the layers, the light, the volumes that insinuate themselves even in two-dimensionality".

Mariana Palma's exhibition "Através" is breathtaking. The artist has explored the most challenging spaces in Oscar Niemeyer's architecture - the Eye, the staircase and one of the lower rooms of the Eye's downward curve - to give us a master class on her vision of nature, a decidedly contemporary baroque style that will open up the widest possible space for visitors' imaginations.

Marc Pottier
Curator