Maria Villares

painting, monotypes and objects

Maria Villares is currently an artist working at her fullest potential. Long experience has afforded her the various skills which allow her to move confidently from one medium to another. Although she began to study art when a teenager, under Nelson Nóbrega, it was not until her adulthood that she saw herself as an artist. It was only in the 1980s that she began to paint. Ten years working with utilitarian ceramics provided her discipline and technical knowledge. When she abandoned the pottery wheel, her aim shifted from precise form to aesthetic experimentation and the search to express an existential uneasiness. She attended Escola Brasil and afterwards studied under Carlos Fajardo, being wise enough to resist the appeals of easy fads, dedicating herself to work in the silence of her studio. The perseverance with which she sought to conjugate her life and work ultimately resulted in a multifaceted production that has drawing as its common denominator.
By means of sketches jotted down in notebooks or on loose sheets of paper, Maria gradually composed an uncommon repertoire of sensorial memories. It should not be assumed, however, that her work is preceded by a graphic project. The lines, the outlines, and the forms described can be derived from observation or from memory. At times she departs from a previous register although never constrainig the gesture, always free from conventions and subjected to the impulse of the moment. Her painting always harbors something of the graphic. An exceptional colorist, Maria’s painting is viscerally pictorial, with a lyricism shot through by a nervous, incisive graphism powerful enough to insinuate unsettling figures. The tension between the pictorial and the graphic in her large canvases is so intense that no viewer remains indifferent to them.
It could be said that this kind of painting runs counter to the “quietism” characteristic to the work of certain painters active in São Paulo. Rather than the constraint evident in the painting of Sérgio Sister, Paulo Pasta and Marco Giannotti – her contemporaries – her canvases evince the unconcealable passion with which she works. This explains why Maria’s painting is still disturbing.
She paints the canvas off from its stretcher bars. First, she lays it out horizontally on a large table. She begins by staining the surface with very dilute paint, building it up through the application of various coats. This overlaying results in an uneven density of t