“POIESIS” by Catarina Rosa
05.08.2022 ------> 01.10.2022
[idea to create or make an impulse of the human spirit to create something out of imagination and feelings]
DANS LA SPIRALE II
“Going beyond the limits of drawing, the thread and the needle are, for Catarina Rosa, a more concrete way of biting into the paper, and of inscribing the physical trace of her impulses, channeled in a constructed and poetic gesture. Constructed, because the artist follows precise rules, technical and compositional “constraints” that she assumes as creative pretexts; poetic, because playing with these same restrictions, she composes her own sensitive universe, in which the delicate forms reveal infinite perspectives and depth. In this recent series, the spiral motif, drawing ever different volutes, and potentially infinite, around a single central axis, appears to be a perfect “creative constraint”. Sensible metaphor of a perpetual motion, powerful but orderly, entropic but measured. Constant force that disperses and gathers, the spiral shapes this complex and necessary ambivalence, always at the center of Catarina Rosa’s work: on the one hand, the impetuous instinct that animates her will to create - like a “cyclic wave that involves [her] senses” - on the other hand, the desire for clarity, even “perfection”, which she entrusts to gesture’s rigor and geometry’s wisdom. Following the rhythm of her own breathing, Catarina Rosa alternately explores the centrifugal movement of the spiral (forms grow and open: inspiration, expansion, elevation) and their centripetal motus (they shrink and fold in on themselves: expiration, contraction, fall). The color, reduced to a fine range of greens, from the lightest to the deeper, sustains the range of motion, while underlining a certain transformative power. In this way, letting herself be carried away by the whirlwind of her spirals is, for the artist, a form to move forward and transform herself, as she “looks inward” and tries to “find her own center”. In fact, it is only through her successive windings that the spiral’s axis finally becomes visible and it is only in movement that equilibrium can be achieved. And by continuing to turn, we can move further away from the axis, as when the spiral splits on the same sheet and we observe, from the outside, the encounter between several dynamic universes, each one unique and singular. However, on the next turn, we may get so close that we can lose sight of the bigger picture, splitting the spiral into segments. Paradoxically, these “close ups”, still, instant images, in the simplistic order that rules the complex movement, threaten the very disappearance of the spiral, like a process, by definition, evolutionary. And yet these space-time fractions - however imperfect, incomplete and asymmetrical - seem to forever crystallize the profound beauty of the whole.”
Cecilia Braschi
Catarina Rosa was born in Faro in 1980. Graduated in Fine Arts, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, in 2004. Between 2003/04 she obtained an Erasmus scholarship, settling in Valencia (Spain), where she was part of the performance course taught by the performer and sound poet Bartolomé Ferrando. Her personal and artistic journey continued through Brussels, Paris, arriving in 2016 at Montreal (Canada), where she has lived and worked ever since. The artist has exhibited in different countries and participated in art fairs such as: Pinta (New York), Arteba (Buenos Aires), Art Paris Art Fair and Bienvenue Art Fair (Paris). She was a finalist for Celeste Prize 2012 (Rome), where she won second prize in the category of painting and drawing. Throughout her artistic career she held several individual and group exhibitions, from which stand out “Réel, Virtuel, Réel”, with the kinetic artist Elias Crespin, at the Musée en Herbe, Paris (2013), the solo exhibition “Trajectory of a Volume”, at the Consulate of Portugal, Paris (2015) and “Le Silence du Mouvement”, at the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, Paris (2019). She is represented by the Eko Sato Gallery in Paris. “Follow the thread, always.” In Catarina Rosa’s work, polymorphic and open to experimentation, sewing asserted itself, in 2004, as her fundamental practice. Since then, this has been her fundamental tool for creation. From the thread to the needle, the artist follows the trajectory of her gesture, establishing a sensitive and intimate relationship with this extended body instrument. The “artist’s body”, as a performer, is a place in itself, this space where the interior and exterior coexists, and from which a dialogue in continuous transformation springs. From this dialogue, structures that are built in space by the accumulation of lines and dots are revealed, forming geometric compositions that she describes as “drawings, microscopic visions of sensations, of this throbbing that is life.”
