Siameses

Catunda belongs to Brazil’s geração oitenta, the generation of artists who emerged against the backdrop of Brazil’s waning dictatorship and distilled the country’s postwar legacy of abstraction into a new mode of figuration. Alongside Beatriz Milhazes, Luiz Zerbini, Leonilson, and other artists associated with the landmark exhibition, Como vai você Geração 80? (Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, 1984), Catunda began to reimagine painting through color and pattern, pop culture and everyday life. Across the past four decades, her practice has interrogated and deconstructed the properties of painting through a self-described art of softness, plied through sundry textiles—t-shirts, towels, flags, carpets—that take on a critical and sculptural corporeality. Based in São Paulo, she has participated in four São Paulo Biennials (1983, 1985, 1994, 2018) and recently held retrospectives at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2019) and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2021).

“I think I’ve been doing a pendular motion, oscillating between radical pop and implied figuration, resulting from procedures of making what I’ve been calling ‘object paintings,’” Catunda has reflected. “In these pieces that I started to call ‘object paintings,’ I relied a great deal on the dramatic aspect, the tactility of velvet, and felt a need to work with volume. My intention was to give my work its own body, a body that was soft and overlaid with covers. Maybe it was a way to build a notion of intimacy…The work took on a very theatrical character” (in F. Brenner, “Leda Catunda and a Poetics of Time,” in Leda Catunda: Tempo Circular/Circular Time, 2019, pp. 235-36).

In Siameses, Catunda connects two “object paintings” through a shared plastic layer that drapes to the floor, spilling outward across the space of the room and expanding the corpus of the work itself. The overlapping fabrics, oriented vertically on the wall, recall the form of other works from the same year, among them Capas Laranja and Seis Capas. Capas com Lago similarly pools at the floor; Dobras com Barriga, like Siameses, alludes to the body. Across these works, the stuffed and overlaid fabrics create soft volumes that break the flatness of the picture plane (the wall), protruding into the real space of the viewer. Like Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, Catunda’s object paintings dismantle the boundaries between art and life, sagging and slouching from the wall and imbuing their subjects with a strange, and sometimes coyly embodied presence. In their embrace of soft, unconventional materials and in their essential corporeality, they also hark back to Postminimalism and, in Brazil, to Neo-Concretism and its experiential, phenomenological ethos.

Catunda meditates on the interconnectedness of bodies—of beings—in Siameses, suggestively positing colorful, lumpy folds of fabric as proxies for coupled human subjects. Siameses pays homage to the iconic performance, Capillary Siamese Twins, first staged by the Brazilian conceptualist Tunga in 1984, which featured identical twins conjoined by long, tangled tresses of hair. The biomorphic metaphor nevertheless remains more fluid in Catunda’s work: at once riverine and umbilical, the blue plastic meanders across the floor, connecting the fabric wall pieces—torsos or landscapes—with a playful, yet equally introspective pathos. “These pieces are like people, which have many, many inner layers, some impossible to reach even for themselves, but still they’re there…as a constitutive part of the subject,” Catunda observed of her work. “I’m very interested in the dimensions of existence and of reality, in intensities and sensations that can be perceived, but not explained” (in Leda Catunda: Tempo Circular/Circular Time, op. cit., p. 237).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park