We are faced with an intriguing series of landscapes created by the artist Stella Mariz. The enigmatic landscapes, at the same time dramatic, intertwine the past, the present, and the deep feelings of the artist, incorporating the idea of simultaneity of places and of multiple times. The series is born in 2014, on a trip to Portugal where the artist's was born, she registers exhaustively ruins along a previously established route. That attitude reminds us of the trips made in the eighteenth century, known as "Grand Tour", in which students of the Italian nobility finished their formation studying and drawing ruins.

 

With the Portuguese ruins photographed, the artist returns to Brazil and starts photographing not only the Brazilian forest, as well as views, that reveal the natural and urban context in which they are inserted. With the images in hand, the creation begins, in which the artist weaves time and the space, through the superposition and interlacing of the various images printed in synthetic fabric, cut and sewn, one by one, using acrylic blanket and steel screen to give volume to landscapes, almost scenographic. The compositions are superimposed on canvases, that are then painted, giving life to photo-paintings. In this procedure, the images of the Portuguese ruins, taken away from its context, and the tropical rainforest of Rio de Janeiro, coexist with images of the city's current landscape.

 

The artist, consciously and skilfully, starts from the visual sensation towards the feeling; uses photography in capturing reality, revealing its aesthetic procedures, choosing the composition and the light of landscapes. In formal and intuitive rearrangements, simultaneously uses different places, times and affections. These landscapes are capable of generating strong feelings, perhaps strangeness, or a state of silence and solitude, as in the category of aesthetic appreciation of the sublime, so common in landscape paintings from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Her landscapes are neither picturesque either. They are impregnated with unreal bias or imaginary, in a interweaving of times and spaces; in red tissues that run down the walls of the ruins bathing the landscapes of the unconscious; in the water reflections of non-existent architectures; in the of brightness landscapes with independent shadows that run through architectures in the compositions.