The number of times we hear or read about the death of the painting is as great as its very capacity to reinvent itself. The examples of this pulsating state of rediscovery, establishing new connections, are many for painting. Experimentations that in many cases replaced the brush, with the body or acted together, one as an extension of the other, or even the painting material itself with the body as a symbol. This is explicit in a huge arc that varies from the post-war, from Pollock's action paintings, to Yves Klein's Anthropometries and Niki Saint Phalle's pigment-filled projectile... 

…This concise history is the basis for studies and questions for the series Diatropry by Stella Mariz. Realize that this series is not configured as a action painting or something similar, but, passing through the works cited, as a work that covers issues related to painting, body and memory.

 

This series, therefore is about the painting in a enlarged state itself. Stella produces painting - and this is an important fact - she uses fabric stitching and photography as a means to discuss an issue of the pictorial plane. It is the manufacturing, the of building of a plane step by step, in a time that runs in a different way from the chronological one, little by little giving pictorial form to the fabric printed with pictures of the ruins and filled with an acrylic blanket. Stella “weaves the painting”, transmits form and volume to the painting. And more than that, these paintings thinks about what is a landscape. In the dialogue between times and places, she uses ruins and palaces of Portugal and Brazil on one side, and Brazilian landscapes on the other. We witnessed not only the historical connection permeated by memories and meanings between Brazil and Portugal, but a state of impermanence between the two places. The ruin constitutes itself as the materiality of the past, the persistence of the memory and culture of that place in the midst of the present time. It behaves like an object displaced from linear time. The ruin carries a historical force of knowledge, by welcoming origins that become lost or out of place in the march time. For Walter Benjamin, this possibility of breaking with progressive time and preventing the rhythm of nature is also expressed in the destructive character of ruin. And so how does this behave in her dialogue or confrontation with the present? It seems to me to be a question raised by the artist. The moment we reflect, especially in large Brazilian cities, in the midst of environmental, political and social discussions, how public space is being transformed and for whom it is being built, the appearance of the image of ruin is significant. I am not trying to state that the future is dark and that society will find its end - at least sooner than we imagine - but I travel another north: ruin is the symbol of how we can excavate our future, that is, realize a dense archaeological activity, understanding our past, revolving our history, and elaborating on what is to come, on the attitudes and reflections to be taken. It is symptomatic the fact that memory / past (ruin) and present (the contemporary landscape of the city) are made in the symbolic measure of a body. Because fundamentally, density and volume are included in that space of the canvas, due to the blanket, which make the planes crave space. Ruin is definitely not the symbolism of the past, here understood as something of the past, but a body. Not only because of the volume, but mainly because of the “red river” that flows through the veins / entrails / limits of its walls and surfaces. The ruins swell, gain projection on a plane, wish to contaminate the present, and it is curious in this sense, because at certain times it is through the windows of these solid structures that we also observe the present. Ruin is a window, an element so committed to the history of painting, and which, referring to the first lines of this essay, is also remade in contemporary pictorial production.

 

Realize that in the series the questioning are being produced and reflected simultaneously, being able to affirm the following: Diatropia does not have a definite time, it is located in a temporal vacuum because what interests is thinking about the present and the past not as opposing situations but as mirrors: reflecting memory is thinking about the present, whether in the game of life or in the realm of art.