Mineral

Elizabeth Jobim

From May 18 to Jul 29 2012

About the artist

Designer, painter, engraver. Elizabeth Jobim’s work stems from the observation of small stones displayed on her studio’s table. According to the artist, her work describes “that moment of observing things, but not only how we look at it, but also how we build our vision geometrically, organising our perception of spatiality of things and the world.” Jobim studied design and painting from 1981 to 1985 with Anna Bella Geiger, Aluisio Carvão and Eduardo Sued at the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro. She studied Visual Communication at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, where she also, in 1989, completed her specialisation in Brazilian Art and Architecture History. In 1992, Jobim completed her Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts of New York, and since 1994 she teaches at the drawing and painting workshop at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage. Elizabeth Jobim lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

 

Mineral | Felipe Scovino

Writing about the Neo-Concrete's legacies in Brazilian art in recent years is not unusual. Topics such as art, life, and sensitive geometry became reliable resources of this excursion and established a model for the transition between modernity and contemporaneity in the country's visual arts. Aside from the exceptions of these categories, Elizabeth Jobim's work highlights the best of the dialogue between Neo-Concrete (or the Brazilian constructive languages) and subsequent artistic productions, where the void becomes a device for the construction of settings. While in Neo-Concrete, the gorge was made up as the volume of works and conveyed, among other acts, as the quality of the body forms, or at least a willingness of a more effective/affective dialogue with the world, if we think, for example, about the works by Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Sergio Camargo, and Willys de Castro, who, in turn, establish a fruitful dialogue with Jobim – in Jobim's most recent series, this research gains continuity and deviations: the void becomes a device for creating locations at the same time as there is a double movement in her works. Canvases now gain volume and incessantly seek a place in the world; there is some dissatisfaction in being only two-dimensional representations. What lies before us are rooms, doors, and all kinds of architectural spaces. At certain times, through experimentation with different qualities of paint and colour, Jobim gets to a shiny surface in which our body finally invades that space. We then find ourselves inhabiting that house. The anthropomorphic canvas size and its proximity to the ground dialogues with the idea of these spaces wanting to be filled.

The second movement is the body of the observer investigating the displacements, twists, and passages the works reveal once making its interest in the gap evident, the space between modules, through an interval that is not merely the space that divides the canvases, but also a line that takes the fracture as an index for the body. It is the emptiness assuming its condition as an integral part of the work, and, therefore, inventor of spaces. As parts constitute a whole, we have the illusion that we incessantly build these spaces because they will never have definitive shapes, even if strictly complete within the reason they were imagined.

Although it has a close connection to the constructive languages and the history of painting, her research actually commenced by using stones as a model. It is interesting and understandable that the artist operates a secular practice in art history (still-life), but also transforms the experience of seeing and exercising volumes of an inorganic element in the creation of a language and affection, that is, in how that shape painted on the canvas may be identified as the body that has its origin in what is more concrete, rude, and at the same time transient, which is nature itself. The work seems to question to what extent it is abstract. Jobim is interested in dualities, in the continuous change, and fundamentally in making visible these almost imperceptible movements/images.

If in previous series the ink invaded the sides of the canvases, marking this "break of the frame" or the desire to pursue the space beyond a two-dimensionality, as the same movement could be observed in the gaps between the canvases, or in the white/void that was the background, for the highlight of an architectural graphics at various times that absorbed a sign of the city (tiles and paving, for example), this new series now decreases the hollow spaces, but not its phenomenological data, that is, its ability to, from an economy of elements or a mere gesture, disrupt the certainties about the visible and invent perception games that makes us dive into a vagueness about our senses. In the same way, the space is being experienced, and so is the colour. In a process of numerous layers, red becomes iron coloured, or blue, after a continual craftsmanship process, becomes purple. The spaces constructed by the canvases don't want to be easily identified, as these transits in a territory that lies between the real and the imaginary. Jobim supports the "primary nature of art": let the work be an eternal enigma. 

 

Felipe Scovino is a professor at Escola de Belas-Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He also works as an art critic and curator.