AGULHA GUIA
Eliane Duarte

Opening: 14.02 — 21h30
Until: 24.03

Curated by Cláudia Saldanha
Visit to the exhibition with the curator | 22h00


Complementary programme:
Master Class, 15th February | 17h00
Saco Azul and Maus Hábitos, in partnership with FBAUP, present:
"Agulha Guia - o percurso e a obra de Eliane Duarte"
- Speakers:
Cláudia Saldanha (curator) e Efrain Almeida (plastic artist and sculptor)
- Presentation and moderation:
Rute Rosas (FBAUP)

Where: Aula Magna, FBAUP | Av. de Rodrigues de Freitas 265


"Eliane Duarte's exhibition brings together the artist's work emerged in the 90's, in Rio de Janeiro, that was prematurely interrupted by her death in 2006. Eliane turned her early paintings into materials. She cut and folded and sew. Turned the canvases inside out, stitched it up again. She would discover surfaces and cover others. Thus, in a work to redefine the work itself, she began a series of reliefs (so to speak) which proved to be a great experimentation in search of new forms which were then relegated to the two-dimensional space.
She created from scraps of canvases, cardboard boxes, leather and also the skin of animals and filled them with cotton and other materials attributing volume and strangeness to their objects. This way, she abdicated the canvas as a representation medium and built surfaces, created strange bodies as if discovering herself, her gestures, her own body, her memory.

In an interview Eliane said "I work with needle and thread as if they were viscera, my large and small intestine... It is through them that I exist and try to make art. With needle and thread I create a small world for myself, where I try to understand me. " The poet Chacal, brother of the artist, once wrote "Eliane goes to get where the sound is still murmur, where the form is still sketch, draft, strangeness... this way te form comes without filter as automatic writing, with the extreme freedom of those who invent from what is lived. "

The nineties were of intense production recognized by a first prize in the National Salon of Plastic Arts of Funarte with the work Veste, in 1994. With this prize, she won an international trip and her work was included in the collection of the Rios's National Museum of Fine Arts. Other important exhibitions would follow, like her first solo exhibition at the Anna Maria Niemeyer Gallery in Rio in 1996, at Galeria Camargo Villaça, in São Paulo, in 1998, at the invitation of Marcantonio Villaça; and at the Canvas Gallery, in Porto, in 2001, at the invitation of José Mário Brandão. She also participated in important collective exhibitions such as "Entretelas", at the Museo Alejandro Otero, in Caracas, Venezuela, with Iole de Freitas and Beatriz Milhazes; "The 90's" in the Imperial Palace of Rio in 1999; and in the Stables of the Lage Park School of Visual Arts with Marcia X. and Lina Kim in 2003. Eliane did not leave many records of her work. She was a quiet person, didn't speak much and did not attend the social substratum of the artistic medium. Premonitory she seemed to realize that she needed to devote herself to her craft without interruption. It can be said that her work belongs to a rather vigorous genealogy of Latin American art. Eliane admired the work of Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark (especially her last phase - that of relational objects). The same admiration extended to the work of Brígida Baltar, with whom she divided a studio, Efrain Almeida and Marcia X. With all of them she maintained an intense dialogue. She revealed a great fascination for Rembrandt and Goya's series of black paintings.

This exhibition brings to light the fleeting activity but of great value of Eliane Duarte. Close friends collaborated with some fragments of memory - a photo, an interview, a drawing. Two works from the Galeria Graça Brandão collection are on display. Criaturas da Noite participated in the exhibition Esculturas como Cicatrizes, in Porto, in Galerias Canvas. Carried out in cloth and covered with beeswax and pigments, these strange three-dimensional organs reveal the vast universe of references that the artist has in her work. With the set of photographs and documents presented, we tried to connect facts, traces, and clues.

Distance and absence are factors that deteriorate our memories. But the poetry of Jackal makes us reach lost links in this tangle of fragments deposited sparingly and undisciplined in our memory. "

Claudia Saldanha



ELIANE
eliane sewing
roc roc roc
eliane sees the life of bias
and doesn't like what she sees
eliane explodes everything
catapump! catapump!
eliane weaves the divergent life
creates bugs ghost mantles
eliane makes the needle her guide
and from the line her tongue
eliane recreates herself in art
eliane de carvalho duarte
roc roc roc


[Free Translation]


Acknowledgments:

Adelmo Lapa
Catarina Rangel Pereira
Catarina Silva Martins
Chacal
Daniel Pires
David Irwin
Efrain Almeida
FBAUP
Galeria Graça Brandão
Gualter Barros
José Mário Brandão
Kiko Richard
Letícia Verona
Lumen
Mariana Vitale
Ricardo Ventura
Rute Rosas
Vicente de Mello
Wilton Montenegro