Solo exhibition
2017 Oct-Dez | What I'm going to seek from the backlands, solitude | Correios Cultural Center - Recife, Brazil.
(Photos: Gustavo Bettini)
Installation - ceramic bust; fabric costume; wooden coat rack; acrylic on paper; sand path; permanent pen on paper; leather bag. 400 cm x 200 cm.
What I'm going to seek in the backlands, solitude
Arid life
Dry life
No leftovers
No debris; edges
It is the stone
And remains alive
Arid life, real life.
"Here is a name to stay: Maria Queiroga. Young and talented, she inaugurates the third Armorial generation, with a vigorous, strong and definitive work. This first exhibition has very strong roots in the immortal movement of Brazilian culture through popular manifestations recreated by painting, the installation and with the addition of sensitive poems, well elaborated, without denying, however, the connection with João Cabral de Melo Neto and with Graciliano Ramos.
From the title of this exhibition one can see that Maria was touched, personally and artistically, by the solitude and harshness of the sertão, or by the Brazilian backlands highlighted, above all, by the work of Cabral and Graciliano...for the beautiful of the tragic. By the tragic feeling of the world, so dear to Don Miguel de Unamuno and to the Iberian spirit of art.
It is possible to say that Maria represents a new vision of the Armorial Movement, feeling in the landscape of the "sertão" the decisive presence of the tragic one in Ariano and Armorial, although in the poet and painter this same tragic gains the name of Solitude. Even because in such a young artist, the tragedy of the world is in the silence and the uneasiness born with solitude. A kind of magic word that replaces all the others. Take, for example, the poems she wrote for this same exhibition. ..
Another definitive detail in this great painting is the harmony of the canvases. Maria has a very personal trait, that of this harmony conquered by taste. The same taste of the artist who observes and loves the sertaneja landscape full of pain and blood under the mantle of solitude. It is, therefore, this reinvented, recreated landscape that appears in its canvases of a girl, a girl educated by the vision of the simple and the wonderful. Something decisive in their training..." (Raimundo Carrero)
