Maria Villares opens her individual exhibition “Weaving Time” on Wednesday, 13 November, at 6 p.m., in the exhibition space at the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita and José Mindlin (BBM), University of São Paulo (USP). Maria exhibits some 40 works in various sizes, supports and techniques that make up the “Nexus” series begun in 2001 though today this word has gained a dimension that encompasses the way the artist produces and relates to her own work and consequently to time (the basis of her creations). Maria called this large series “Nexus” because in Latin “Nexus” means knot, weave or wrapping like a network, which describes what is present in her work.

The works are weaves woven in nylon and polypropylene, watercolours, objects, drawings and collages in mixed media that use diverse materials such as lead, steel, PVC, raffia, rice paper and carbon paper prints on polyester arranged in homologous groupings according to the various phases of the artist’s life, which interchange seamlessly and permeate the past in the present.

Maria has been working with a strategy that has been common to many artists since the 1960s, namely a series or development of ideas or themes with titles. “Nexus” is the name of the 2001 series, based on Maria’s observation of spider webs covered in dew against the morning light, of the location of the universal in the particular, and of cocoons woven with nylon threads. It also represents the synthesis of many past series and of incessant searches in the art world, literally casting into space the duration of imagined time or even the construction of metaphors based on her memories. “It is from this time that the materials weave the spaces, whether large or small, which are appropriate for the process of artistic achievement”, adds Luiz Armando Bagolin, whose curation emphasizes the link between the sets and subsets present in the Maria’s work and the dissolution of the perception of space conditioned by physical time.