“Think about the ocean: it has a visuality which is not simply rational. It has to do with the order of Nature. It’s both sensible and structured, and that's what I try to show in my work.”
—Beatriz Milhazes

With her vibrant and rhythmic abstract paintings constructed with collage-like layers of paint, Beatriz Milhazes’ work explores place, memory and cross-cultural identity. In Mares do Sul, the titular work from her first major solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the Brazilian artist pulls elements from nature, architectural forms, geometry, folklore and religion to create a dynamic canvas that captures joyful and energetic contradictions. By building such dense layers of colour and form, Milhazes wants to show us her Brazil - a Brazil which combines 16^th century traditional imagery and cultural clichés with European modernism. Leaning into Western assumptions with some irony, the artist is ‘playing with what the world thinks of as her culture—she’s giving us what we expect, but she’s made it up’.ⁱ

 

In Mares do Sul, carnivalesque flowers and delicate baroque arabesques burst in vibrant hues of red, yellow, pink, gold and blue. A central fragment of a circle contains stylised waves, crashing into the intricately layered motifs, which are largely contained in segments of deep purple and blue. On the left of the canvas, vertical oscillations of ochre and gold push against Milhazes’ cascading landscape, at once framing and activating its pulsing energy. This dynamic composition not only evokes the crashing waves of Copacabana, but also acknowledges Roberto Burle Marx’s iconic patterned pavements that line the beachfront of Milhazes’ home, Rio de Janeiro.  

 

Beginning her career in the early 1980s, Milhazes joined a progressive group of Brazilian artists named after their inaugural 1984 group show, Como Vai Você, Geração 80? (How are you, generation 80?). Rejecting the conceptual and minimalist aesthetics of the 1970s, Geração 80 favoured a more energetic expression of painting. Milhazes combined this energetic shift with influences such as the earlier Anthropophagia movement, which encouraged artists to assimilate, rather than reject, certain European colonial influences found in Brazil. Both visually and thematically, the present work is reminiscent of the smooth, rounded modernist forms of Tarsila do Amaral, a leading figure of Anthropophagia. Both artists focused on rendering subjects and themes native to Brazil through a lens of western modernism and abstraction.

 

 

Building upon the principle of collage, inspired in part by her encounter with Henri Matisse’s cut outs on a trip to Paris, Milhazes adopts a unique painting process that borders on printmaking. In 1989, she developed her ‘monotransfer’ technique where acrylic paint is applied to smooth plastic sheets and transferred wet to her canvases. Once dry (sometimes taking up to ten hours in the humidity of Rio) the plastic is peeled away, leaving a smooth layer of paint with the appearance of a transfer print. Depending on how many layers of paint are used in this process, fraying can occur, something that Milhazes assures us is deliberate, allowing her to condense multiple motifs of varying intensity into one superimposed image. These plastic sheets are then kept and reused, allowing Milhazes to continually layer ready-made motifs onto other compositions, while occasionally adding new elements that allows her to build upon her existing visual language. Within this context, her art making goes beyond collage-making in the tangible sense and is taken into the realm of the abstract – her practice is also a collage. 

 

Mathematical dreams

 

Milhazes has often referred to her works as ‘mathematical dreams’, combining concentric disks, lines and motif with contrasting segments of colour in a painstakingly thought out process.ⁱⁱ These canvases, often pushed to their compositional limits, offer a powerful connection to nature. As the artist explains:

“Coming back to my circles, they’re not only about geometry, about optical movements, they're connected to Nature: the breath and speed of the forests, flowers, leaves, animal shapes, the power of the waves, water, oceans, the Earth’s rotation, the Sun, the Moon, day, night, sky, light.” ⁱⁱⁱ 
—Beatriz Milhazes

Within the present work, looping arabesques, lace and disks come together in overlapping circular forms, reminiscent of the Orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Meanwhile, striating vertical and diagonal lines, recalling Bridget Riley’s kinetic art of the 1960s create multiple focal points and optical depth. The kaleidoscopic surface formed by the marriage of these techniques upon her canvases create a body of work that teeters on the edge of deliberate and accidental, order and chaos. As Paulo Herkenoff concludes on Mares do Sul, ‘Vertical waves are the phantasms of a world turned upside down. This is Beatriz Milhazes’s Baroque atlas.’^iv

 

 

Collectors Digest

• The artist has just completed a large solo UK show at the Turner Contemporary Museum, with an exhibition spanning the entirety of her career from 1980s to present day.

• Following the Mares do Sul show in 2002, Beatriz Milhazes represented Brazil in the 2003 Venice Biennale

• Her work is part of prestigious international collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Banco Itaú, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

 

 

ⁱ Jane Cohan, quoted in ‘Landscape Artist Roberto Burle Marx’s Lasting Influence’ Wall Street Journal Magazine, 28 April, 2016, online.

ⁱⁱ Beatriz Milhazes, quoted Every work I create is a mathematical dream’ – an interview with Beatriz Milhazes, Apollo Magazine, 24 April, 2018, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Beatriz Milhazes, quoted in ‘Beatriz Milhazes in Conversation with Polly Apfelbaum’ Pace Gallery, 23 September, 2022, online.

^iv Paulo Herkenhoff, "Beatriz Milhazes-the Brazilian Trove", exh. cat., Beatriz Mihazes: Mares do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, 2002, p. 150.