GARDEN OF DELIGHTS
Individual exhibition – Flavia Bertinato
In her second solo exhibition at Celma Albuquerque Galeria de Arte, Flávia Bertinato presents a selection of heterogeneous works, including photographs, drawings, paintings and an installation. The exhibition “Garden of Delights” starts from architectural elements that already exist in the physical space, such showcases, glass and gardens, as references for the process of creating her recent works and in the mediation with other productions that also participate in the exhibition and that mark different moments in the artist’s journey.
The exhibition establishes connections with a device that would resemble a greenhouse, a piece of architecture that in the 19th century, the time of its greatest diffusion in the social fabric, was often associated with libidinous experiences. In the writings of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, the space of the greenhouse is presented as being the “dream space”, where new social relationships are configured, amidst itineraries and public encounters, unknown until that point. For historians of private life, the greenhouse not only gave status to the bourgeois architecture of the beginning of modernity, but also favored the intimacy of family members without the surveillance that operated within the domestic environment.
In “Garden of Delights” the artist brings a repertoire of images that refer to the sphere of intimacies, whether in the adoption of photographic clippings, in th themes addressed in the show or in the type of treatment with the painting of the walls of the space, in addition to making the characteristics of the garden in the external area of Celma Albuquerque Galeria de Arte extend into the exhibition space.
In this exercise, Flávia Bertinato problematizes notions around the public sphere versus the private sphere and dissects a symbolic and gestural vocabulary of the observation of the body and floral motif: surfaces, volumes, textures, stains, grooves, cavities, cracks and gestures.
In the exhibition she also presents 20 works among paintings and drawings from the series “Garden of Delights (II)” (2017-2018), in a selection that prioritized including different moments of her production process. These works (in oil on paper), are translucent very thin, and refer to the ambiguity of the floral theme, being sometimes related to human reproductive organs, given the intensity of the erotic charge of the shape of some plants, as well as the association with the materiality of the plants. At other times, these works in the series refer to an attempt to explore colors, surfaces, lines, spaces and volume, which are articulated in less descriptive forms in relation to the observed object.
The artist has been living in Belo Horizonte since 2013, having held an individual exhibition at Palácio das Artes (2009) and presented an installation at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, as a part of her participation in the Bolsa Pampulha Program (2013-2014). She also participated in collective exhibitions at Galeria Celma Albuquerque and in alternative spaces, such as her domestic space (her own room) in Ateliê Aberto (2014), and Guerrilla Exhibition (2014), which took place in an uninhabited house.
Graduated with a Bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts from UNESP, 2002, and a master’s degree from the School of Communications and Arts from USP, 2013, she held solo exhibitions False Alarm (Centro Cultural São Paulo, 2004), Last and First Session (Centro Universitário Maria Antônia, USP, São Paulo 2005), Solstice (Galeria Virgílio, São Paulo, 2008), Outlaw (Galeria Marília Razuk, 2013), Rapunzel (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, CCBB Rio de Janeiro, 2015-2016) and Sublimation (Galeria Marília Razuk, São Paulo 2017), among others. In 2015, she was awarded the CCBB Contemporâneo Award, Banco do Brasil Cultural Center and the Artistic Diving Program, Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, São Paulo.