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In
20 years of his artistic career, Walter Miranda, has always worked with
philosophical and conceptual questions even social as global. In this
new series called: SEATTLE PROJECT: GAIA EXALTATION,
the artist uses as theme the planet Earth, by the free pictorial representation
of the answer letter of the native
Chief Seattle (1790/1866) to Franklin Pearce, the USA president,
offer to buy the native land in exchange of a reservation at 1855. The
text is a work of great beauty, poetry and philosophy, which predicts
the situation of ecological degradation of the Earth, being a pertinent
literature today.
Gaia, in Greek, Earth in English, was the first primordial divinity
of the Greek theogony, after the chaos. From her everything begins,
since her natural forces which are mythological represented by her children,
until the creatures that live and depend on her, animals and plants.
In this sense, the theme, Gaia Exaltation, becomes clear when we realize
the presence of the planet image, in all works exhibited, at distintive
conceptual circunstances.
Walter makes construtivists compositions by the Golden Section, which
is a mathematical relation observed in many creations of the nature
and present on the ancient mathematical studies. At the same time he
eliminates the geometrical rigidity of the compositions creating an
organic relationship of the spaces through the logarithmic spiral. The
conjunction of the compositive lines propitiates figurative forms which
are integrated to the theme by the artist in a realistic or estylized
way. Using the traditional technique of oil painting, he takes textures
and peculiar visual effects from the overlaps of sprinkled,
wrinkled paint layers and abstract strokes whose are applied
in the background and in the extrude figures, that were
drawn in cardboard, cut and glued on the works during the compositional
process.
Through the incorporation of computers circuit boards (some sawed
and others ground by emery to get geometrical and figurative forms
like locomotives, trees, human, etc.), chips, batteries and many
elements of our technological nowadays, besides nature elements, like
seeds, leaves, ground, ashes, etc., Walter, illustrates in a simbolic
manner the current dichotomy of nature versus the inconsequent
use of the technology provoquing reflections about the environment question,
the performance of the Man in the planet and the responsability
on this ecological llegacy, as we observe in the work where he incorporates
a glass with pure water (taken from the Tiete river's beggining) and
other with polluted water (taken from the same river but in Sao Paulo
downtown). Besides that, repeating some images like the Earth,
ballerinas, children, and others, the artist creates a repertory
that gives emphasis to a universe of meanings that has no intention
to transmit decoded messages to the spectator, since the utilization
of these elements as details, or foreground, obligates the spectator
to examine the metonymic relations of each element provoquing him questions,
in order to reach his own conclusions about the theme. The outcome is
the complicit or the denial, because both are the two sides of the same
coin.
The artist, therefore, looks for linking the reason to the sense, the
basis of his creative process. The outcome is a work with totally new
style, although based on traditional techniques, seeks its overcome
and transformation and, because of that, has deep roots on history,
culture and artistic language (as observed a Brazilian poetry, Ferreira
Gullar), where the style is identificable by the compositive
conception, and the technique (variable) is only a mere instrument.
As wrote Kandinsk: "The artist must have something to say, for mastery
over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner
meaning."
November/1988
Flavia Venturoli Miranda |