PATRICIA LEITE - Mendes Wood

At first, there seems to be few less inspiring places to write about the Patricia Leite’s paintings than a village in the outskirts of Cologne, Germany, with the temperature around zero and the eyes on a landscape of dead trees, houses and buildings arranged in a repetitive sequence, in shades of white, gray, beige and dark green. The sky, obscured by a thick layer of clouds, does not draw any memory of distant sunny beaches, marked by the encounter of the sand, the sea and the solid blue of the sky, except for a melancholy remembrance, by an almost physical longing for heat and expansion of open space; the look that tries to go as far as the eye can see, on a deserted, luminous beach day.

However, in the artist’s studio, in Belo Horizonte, in a sort of underground room, below the house swimming pool and open as a balcony, what one sees is the projection of a comprehensive and ugly view of the city’s urban sprawl on the landscape, nowadays completely uncharacteristic by years of greedy real estate speculation, so typical of medium size and large Brazilian cities. From inside this small studio, we come across one of the fundamental questions of Patricia’s paintings: wouldn’t they represent a kind of archeology of the look? Of landscapes of the past now submerged by the weight of occupation of all spaces? Wouldn’t this be, however, a local and personal interpretation of the artist’s work? And couldn’t it be when we are in a strange place – on the gray outskirts of Cologne in winter, for instance – inversely thought as the melancholy of displacement and consequent loss of a beloved landscape? Would Patricia’s paintings evoke holidays sought by any petit bourgeois? A deserted beach, a circus or a countryside soccer field, a journey by river or just the availability of time for contemplation?

In this ambiguity, between a highly personal imagery, in which the choice of a “subject” stems
from the artist’s own experience – a vacation trip or a scene from a movie seen recently- and
another composed of ideal, idyllic images sought after by all sorts of people, a structure of
simplification of shapes, lines and colors, which gives unity to the work resides and develops. The starting point is not so much the source of the image itself, but rather the question: given this source, this picture I found when I returned from vacation, for example, how can I condense its elements in order to give them unity within the plane of the canvas? What kinds of solutions will be necessary to abstract this image, make it lean, and still, project it not only as a recognizable landscape, but also as a painting from which new relationships, new contacts, new perceptions between two colors emanate, and therefore, between them and the line that follows this meeting.
When we look at the paintings – perhaps the best expression is chassis, since the paintings are
on wood – we are forced to go beyond the simple recognition of a figuration or “theme” to
concentrate on the colors that create a line or mass of one shape.

This framework of formal simplification – which structures or bases the landscape which refers to the artist’s wishes and memories – also implies a relationship of the painter’s affection with the pictorial tradition of the past, which also used this basis. Here, there is a direct dialogue – internalized in the work, however – with painters that flirted with the European heritage and that started from a point of view of popular art, such as Volpi and his banners, or Lorenzato and his dirt roads and trees, to name only Brazilians. Painters who instigated a look, not only on the figuration or “theme”, but about their formal solutions, especially when small, humble and personal. These solutions are first committed to the painting and second with what they actually represent. They are shapes of color on wood that maybe find identity with the trajectory of a painter like Ellsworth Kelly, who kept apart from minimalism, though he sought simplicity, absorbing abstraction passionately by means of solid colors and lines.
The same affective relationship the artist cultivates with the different choices of “themes” is
established in the game the construction of formal structures, since the conversation is not with the solution itself, but with what it has of personal and non transferable. How to bring light in one line? How to make one point shine on a black canvas? These issues are raised and brought into dialogue with artists of other generations, which somehow can only exist in silence of look and in the hard and daily work in the studio.
In this context, Patricia Leite’s work, with a career of over twenty years, can transit between
abstract and figurative, without ranks, by a hedonism that seeks past and lost paradises, while
reiterating pleasure, present in the act of painting with paints and brushes: colors, lines, shapes, composition, canvas, image.

Ricardo Sardenberg
Cologne, Germany
January 26, 2012