artnexus #54

Beatriz Milhazes (Río de Janeiro, 1960) was one of the participants in the show How Are You, Generation 80, held in her hometown in 1984. This show, which brought together more than 100 artists from different parts of Brazil, was considered the birth of a new generation of Brazilian artists. One feature shared by all the participants was that, without ignoring international trends such as Italy’s transavantgarde or Germany’s neoexpressionism, they displayed a special interest in revisiting and rethinking their own country’s artistic traditions from a contemporary perspective.

Loyal as she is to that intention, Milhazes’ paintings since the early 1980s are populated by both local and international references, references derived from popular culture and history. The Brazilian baroque, the West’s Great Tradition, carnival decorations, jewelry, embroidery, and popular music —are some of the many influences in her work. And despite the presence of elements traditionally associated with the realm of the feminine, positing issues of gender doesn’t seem to be her intention. Childhood memories, an accumulation of frequent visual references, provide her with arguments for the establishment of a singular relationship between lines, colors, and light in images that seem to be in constant flux.

One of the most outstanding features of this artist’s paintings is her ability to combine, without conflict, that very multiplicity of iconographic references with a poetics where such heterogeneous elements are organized on the basis of a particular sense of balance, using a painstaking technique that forces the viewer to stop and look, in order to recognize the diversity of forms that are involved. 

IVONNE PINI