“Doubt is to write. Therefore it is the writer, too. And with the writer, all the world writes.”[1]

This statement by Marguerite Duras (1914 – 1996) in Writing (1993) may also apply to other languages, such as painting and drawing. I can only imagine that when Andy Villela, an artist from Rio de Janeiro, was painting the canvases featured in Algaravia, her solo exhibition which runs until June 22 at Casa Triângulo gallery in São Paulo, the whole world was painting too. Algaravia is a word that lies in a maelstrom of voices and actions whose complexity makes it incomprehensible. And I carry on with this text, allowing myself the uncertainty of the process of writing about something that escapes definition.

Upon viewing the range of techniques and gestures present in Andy’s paintings, I considered linearity as a fragile structure when faced with the plethora of perspectives that life offers us. In Algaravia‘s paintings, there is a play between representation and abstraction, with vibrant brushstrokes and opaque, nebulous colours. The concern with making “some sense” appears to be diluted in the set of images created, becoming the core of the exhibition.

In a description written by the artist and narrated by Brazilian singer-songwriter Letrux, Andy explains that her work involves the body, mind and spirit triad, where the body appears through the surface, the mind through decisions and deliberations, and the spirit through forms. This suggests a process of discovering and rediscovering oneself. The materiality of light and shadow embodies uncertainty and doubt in her compositions. Andy also states in this account that she is similar to so many other artists. The reason for this is that artists study similar themes but touch them in different ways, bringing new interpretations of the same subjects to the world, making the lack of answers clear and opening up the creation of new questions.

In line with the exhibition’s title, five critical texts by five different curators have been put together to broaden its conception: Carollina Lauriano, Clarissa Diniz, Lucas Albuquerque, Lorraine Mendes and Victor Gorgulho, which can be read on the gallery’s website.

The first connection I made when I entered the gallery space was with the twentieth-century surrealist avant-garde movement, especially the mysticism of the Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908 – 1963) and the English artist Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011), both of whom were interested in the enchantment of the unconscious and its fantasies. However, Andy Villela’s singular gestures also embrace other layers connected to the contemporary, and we can connect with many other artists who research fragments, transformation, chaos and subjectivity. And everything written here adds to this turmoil, like an attempt to lick the sweet and rare surface of the sky above us.^[2]

[1] DURAS, Marguerite. Writing.
^[2] Quote taken from the curatorial text written by Victor Gorgulho on Algaravia.