Navigating various references, Patricia Leite gives an outlet to her memories and latent affections through an extremely peculiar pictorial exercise. Bucolic scenes from trips or images extracted from videos that caught her attention trigger a process towards paintings that come into existence in a rare combination between seriousness and leniency. In her cohesive body of work, we find recurring echoes and resonances from themes and styles that are well represented in the history of art, such as landscape painting and pop art elements. However, these resources are always used as a support to express intimate manifestations that could be in a diary or in a map with organically collected and carefully edited images.
Read MoreVibrating between abstraction and figuration, her artworks deal with the movement from a solid state to an inconstant moment. While her use of large colour blocks on the absorbingly-rigid wood put us in front of imposing planes, on the other, everything that is there cannot be fully, let alone definitively, defined. Rather, what we have is an opening of light that outlines everything whilst leaving room for us to witness its constant transformations. We see the emergence of points of contact–that are always inexact–between the ethereal and matter.
From striking colours such as avocado green and solid tones of blue, to graphic frugality, the artist chooses her building blocks to portray the world in different levels of intensity. Behind her choices lies her desire to get closer to singular atmospheres and to touch sensations that surface from visual experiences, such as basking in the sun in Minas Gerais, watching a carnival parade or contemplating nightfall on the beach.
Patricia Leite (Belo Horizonte, 1955) lives and works in Belo Horizonte.
Her works has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as Mínimo, múltiplo, comum, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018); Aprendendo Com Dorival Caymmi - Civilização Praieira, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2016); The Circus as a Parallel Universe, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2013); Outra Praia, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2005).
Text courtesy Mendes Wood DM.
