Erika Verzutti: À Sombra das Raparigas em Flor

Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present its second exhibition with the São Paulo artist Erika Verzutti. The show includes paintings on medium density fiberboard (MDF), a bronze sculpture, and several drawings. The title In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower-the second volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past¬-has an almost literal relationship with Verzutti’s paintings of dresses, but also reveals the artist’s interest in the Proustian strategy of creating different visual stimuli without establishing a necessary connection between the images’ significations.

In this new series, Verzutti paints with acrylic paint on MDF cut into the shape of dresses. Disparate shapes such as a bouquet of flowers, a seal, a landscape, or a pineapple are organized into each dress’s unique silhouette. It is a repertory of everyday images, many of them linked to the ornamental universe or to mass culture, and the artist creates a permanent collision with conventional forms and hierarchies of organization in figuration.

There is no choice of a perspective, but a collage of various perspectives. There is no preference for a specific palette or style, but their accumulation and superposition. Incorporating accidents into the trajectory of the painting, Verzutti transforms dripped paint into a flower, which in turn creates the necessity for a garden, a sky, etc. Many times a “stretched” color appears, expanded from a figure. The bet on a certain disengagement with painting is revealed not only in the absence of hierarchy, but also in an artistic practice that favors the hybrid object: the cut-out form gives the painting the status of an object; it purposefully mixes together art and decoration.

The same principle of “stretching” an image is used in a group of drawings where Verzutti uses watercolors to amplify the original cut-out paper forms with images of candy. The polychrome bronze sculpture Saramandaia shows a tangle of things arranged in a vase as if they were flowers. Each of the shapes-woman, animal, flower, paint, fruit-emerges as if it were created by the vase itself. The repetition of certain elements, whether in drawing, painting, or sculpture, and their constant reprocessing indicates the search for a visual language that feeds itself, creating a personal universe.