Tessituras entre espaço e memória na obra de Maria Helena Vieira da Silva e Arpad Szenes

Abstract

The theme of this masters dissertation is the joint study of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes´s work, artists who were a couple, active in the context of the modern École de Paris, having lived exiled in Brazil during the 1940s, due to the Second World War. Vieira da Silva´s work focuses on the borders of pictorial dialogue between time and space or, more specifically, on the dialectic tension between the construction and the deconstruction of perspective. In turn, Arpad Szenes has a recognized series of works where he portrays the wife on everyday moments, including occasions that she dedicates herself to creative activities. The poetics‟ duet undertaken by the couple, beyond promoting a “metalinguistic” questioning of painting between traditional and modern, allows us to weave new meanings for the interface art/life. By portraying Vieira da Silva in her atelier moments, Arpad Szenes translates the artist´s plastic thinking under his gaze, on the creation of a “myth” that retells his story with his wife, enabling the construction of a shared painting. Such sharing originates on the dialogue between the couple´s works, but it is reinforced on the poets´ productions, critics and writers, what constitutes a circle of artistic-cultural acquaintanceship around the two artists, in the shapes of modernism´s sociability. In this rich exchange of experiences and productions, the art reveals its best interface, by the appreciation of everyday instant. A scenario is set up where space´s materiality joins memory‟s subjective temporality, from where Vieira da Silva and Szenes´ work emerges as an exemplar case.