dawn and dusk again
tiago mesquita"In her most recent works which in my opinion are her best, the artist supports three large, black slabs of granite on a wall. They appear as serial monoliths, black and insurmountable fronts. They are almost minimalist, in the same way that McCracken is minimalist, if they didn’t have the color they have on the back. Behind these slabs of black stone we see a reddish glow, rosy and smooth; tucked away as a remainder of a painting that is hidden behind an opaque surface.
The monolithic and achromatic aspects of the stones front appear as if it’s trying to hide the light that emanates from within it. At first glance, we have the impression that the artist has put on some paintings backwards. With the painted side facing the wall. It’s back to the room and the public. Far from our eyes, the color seems to slowly fade.
This fading, however, is slow and becomes a kind of light of the Stone itself. It has the color of late afternoon, the color of a glow that was once strong, but that is about to fade. A color that sets, until it gets dark for good and turns into night. In the next stone the glow appears slowly, like morning light, in a timid light, which can't overpower the night, but makes it gain more subtle contours. It allows us to take note in what the darkness stole from us."
january 2008
Fragment extracted from a piece written by the critic Tiago Mesquita, 2008 for the solo show Sol de Inverno (Winter Sun), at the Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte MG.
low light