“Artists are the ones who preserve inside themselves, untouched and new,
this dreamed passage of their childhood. They carry the ability to remain
a child without giving up their process of maturity.”
André Comte-Sponville
In fact, a united artistic thought is revealed in this group of works of some motional lovingness. Those works show a nomad path of Stela’s goals and the spectator’s responses. This interrupted production creates tension between the inadequate and the remaining.
Conscientious, Stela Barbieri questions the role of the artist as someone who unveils something (showing an inquiring interiority) and builds a poetic history.
Irresolute, she wishes to bond disparities, objects that seem to avoid junction. And in this powerful linking process, she surrenders to an immunological experience. Tracing her uncontrollable craving for herself, Stela makes the world pregnant with her presence. To her, there is no inaptitude of the sewing-thread.
Her Art suggests a trip to the most slippery side of the soul. Warps of unequal actions are her greatest challenge. Subject inside itself, the tangible requires an especial procedure, a precise material for each piece of work. Resting on Stela’s hands, the materiality overspreads from this world to another.
Traces and depth perspectives become drawing, disclosing a silent and investigative course.
The skin is diffused all over the matter, pregnant pieces to reveal a land of freedom and passion.
Doing with the hand,
Doing with the mother,
Doing like the mother. (1)
Artists who tell learn by listening. Letting themselves run free when facing new possibilities, forgetting about their own world, they end up finding out a fresh reality: from the absorption of a malleable world comes the continuation of a life.
Rubens Espírito Santo2 e Ângela Castelo Branco3
1 in Portuguese, a play with words, using the similarity in sound and spelling between the word “mão” – hand - and the word “mãe” – mother.
2 Rubens Espírito santo is plastic artist, philosopher and Professor of Art Philosophy, also founder of the University of Free Art of São Paulo.
3 Ângela Castelo Branco is Master in Education, coordinator of technique at the University of Free Art of São Paulo.
