Vamos chamar o vento Patricia Leite

Mendes Wood DM São Paulo is delighted to present Patricia Leite’s fourth solo show at the gallery. Under the title Vamos chamar o vento [Let’s Call the Wind], the exhibition features oil pastel drawings, collages and recent paintings.

In Leite’s early painting process, drawing is used as a departure point, autonomous from the canvas. The artist has a singular way of separately studying each layer of color, form and line, following a process similar to music composition. These differences between image elements reappear in her first oil pastel drawings. The tones of color have individuality in terms of time and cadence and are exempt from any objective order.

When looking back to the beginning of her career in the 1980s ­– when abstraction and free form on paper guided the artist in the construction of images depicting the bottom of the sea, the wind, the sound of an acoustic guitar, immaterial thoughts and human feelings – we see that Leite’s collages and drawings reflect a personal desire for the exercise of freedom and courage.

Her introduction to painting is conjured by the austerity of landscape, evoking Dorival Caymmi’s beach song from 1940, O Vento [The Wind], that lends its title to the exhibition. The song suggests a possible way of understanding the relationship between Leite’s drawing and painting on wood. The music narrates how a small fishing village cyclically depends on the wind, the sea and animals to preserve its life system: the wind that hits the sails / the sail that takes the boat / the boat that takes people / people that take the fish / fish that makes money, Curimã. The rhythmic repetitions evoke a layered movement, as if the everyday action of fishing and contemplating natural forces produced Caymmi’s landscape. These repetitions are the axis that unite the initial process materialized in Leite’s drawings and collages and the final act of her painting.

The works presented in this exhibition not only reflect the abstract foundations of Leite’s landscapes but are also a narration of the symbols that generate the artist’s gaze towards the most well-known elements of her practice, such as the work Chuva [Rain], from 2020, made of layers that uncover violet under cobalt blue, revealing her work as an exercise in contemplation and a fusion of aesthetic forces.

The exhibition fragments Patricia Leite’s painting tools by presenting first her drawings and collages, which are then almost musically merged into the three paintings on wood. For the artist, this poetic construction is a generous movement towards time and things but, most importantly, towards a comprehension of landscape as a way of observing nature and human needs.

Patricia Leite (Belo Horizonte, 1955) lives and works in São Paulo.

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).