Renata Leoa: Terra de ninguém

Of the seven new paintings that Renata Leoa is showing in the exhibition Terra de ninguém [No Man's Land], only one reveals a domestic scene to the public. In Janela através da janela [Window through the window], two windows share the central space of the canvas. The artist only allows us to partially view the one on the right, smaller and apparently horizontal. It contains an almost abstract scene. The lower part in light yellow contrasts with the upper part in shades of blue and white. It is very difficult to look at this configuration and not see a seascape.    

The artist makes many references to the history of art, such as the presence of a painting confused with a window, but before these came others. Leoa grew up splitting her experience of the world in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, seen through the window of her house and movements within the city, with the landscapes that her father, Antonio, painted and hung on the walls of their home. Many of them, like the one revisited by the artist in Janela através da janela [Window through the window], shared space with the windows of the house, and signaled to the artist from an early age that it was possible to build places. Today, the artist's essentially urban landscapes are much more like constructions than simple representations. What we see on each canvas is the result of a process in which Leoa mixes her memories, such as her father's landscapes, with her own records (mental and photographic).

“I really like putting things over things,” the artist said in one of our conversations about her work. “Things” are all the images that she collects of the city through her daily life. Not just the one she experiences now, in her adult life, but also an earlier routine, which she experienced from a young age in the Rio de Janeiro shantytowns where she was born and raised. These are also the layers of paint and their traces of erasure. The buildups, which on the windows are like clothes put out to dry faster in the sun, but which in other parts of the canvas are clumps of paint with a physical presence that is almost like a character in the scene. Things are also mixtures of different materials, such as oil paint, chalk, pastel and oil pastel, as well as shards of glass (in Caminho do Sentinela – The Sentinel's Path, 2024), pieces of dried paint left at the bottom of the recipients the artist uses (in Irajá/Brazil), and an iron structure with tarp (in Vende-se terrenos/lotes - Plots of Land for Sale). All of this on canvas, which at times is just in its raw version. To paraphrase the poet Waly Salomão, painting is like a video editing station.

There is another striking element in the artist's work: human presence is rare in Leoa's paintings. At least physically. It exists much more in the form of traces, small clues such as the lights in the houses of the nightscapes (in Esticando a noite - Stretching the night out and A falta que se torna tudo - The absence that becomes everything) or the vehicles parked in the streets and garages (in Encruza). For example, on the right-hand side foreground of Window through the Window, we see part of a set table. This colored plane, half tilted, blends in with another closer one (configured as the wall of the scene), and is maintained as a table largely due to the silverware placed on it. In Vende-se terrenos/lotes [Plots of land for sale], the use of a metal structure as part of the painting, one of those used as a stand for advertising, brings part of the dynamics of these spaces into the exhibition space. Every advertisement is communication, made by someone and intended to reach other people. Here, the structure supports an advertisement for the sale of land plots on a damaged material, revealing the other part of the work, behind the tarp.

This presence is also evident in the way the artist constructs her landscapes. The use of memory and photographic records, as well as the generous scale, reinforce final scenes that are seen from the inside rather than from a distance. They are alleys, backstreets, blind spots, skewed cuts, spaces that seem difficult to cross. A spatial dynamic revealed through the artist's research on the architecture and construction modes within the favela. This fragmented and dynamic space influences the very way the painting is constructed, with different brushstroke techniques and the use of varied materials, which together reconstruct this territory. These are situations, more than just landscapes, which memory cannot clarify, and that painting chooses not to reveal. In a way, it is as if we are placed in the same location where Leoa has already been, even though we have never been there.

In this sense, it could be said that all of Renata Leoa's paintings are like domestic scenes because even the urban landscapes are revealed from a very personal perspective, by someone who has always been there. Streets, windows, corners, people, objects. Everything has a history known to the artist. It is a territory that has an owner and that highlights the irony present in the title chosen for this exhibition. The expression “no man's land” is usually used to refer to an unoccupied or abandoned space, but most of the time it hides its political and social dimension, which is that of a territory, and beyond that, a disputed narrative. We can think of this expression historically, taking as an example the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, and also the peripheral areas of large cities today. Leoa's paintings are, in some way, the meeting ground for both of these interpretations.

Fernanda Lopes