Pequeno mapa do tempo Paula Siebra

paula’s saijiki 

The rain falls in fine streaks: silvery dashes that strike the hot surface of the ceramic roof tiles, lined up in waves all the way to the eaves. Large drops hang from them and trickle down one after another in teardrop shapes, making a popping sound as they hit whatever they touch. Trá-tá-tá. Plic…plic. You can almost hear the sound of the patter and the dripping, which carries the message that the year begins wet. 

Nearby, on another canvas, pointed leaves overlap in several layers, some illuminated by a flash of light, others sinking into shadow. The palette is entirely golden-olive: ochres, moss greens, browns, and gold, all within the same tonal family, with very low contrast, bathed in a warm, filtered light, like the light that filters through a garden after the rain. It takes a moment to spot the snail – it’s in the center of the canvas, its slimy body stretched out like a leaf, its rounded shell almost blending in with the pattern and color of the leaves surrounding it. Paula lets it sink into the foliage, so that the eye must search for it and recreate the snail’s slow pace. In the lower corner, two tiny white dots, two minuscule four-petaled flowers, are the only clear and distinct feature, almost like a breath of fresh air. If you look closely, the canvas’s weave shows through the paint and creates a grainy, tactile texture with a damp surface. Here, the eye often becomes the snail itself, slowly traversing the world up close. 

In 2025, Paula Siebra spent three months in Kyoto, drawn by the affinity between the state of awareness her paintings evoke and how Japanese culture perceives the experience of time. There, amid the midsummer heat, she crafted haiku with the monk Osawa Genka, painted cicadas and sunbeams, and published a small book. For over a thousand years, Japanese culture has organized time around the seasons through what is known as kigo, a term that anchors a poem in a specific season and evokes an entire emotional atmosphere. In a haiku, one does not say “it is spring”; rather, one writes “cherry blossom,” and the entire season is evoked, with its associations of transience and renewal. Bashō brings this idea to life: “At the foot of the tree, / even in the soup, in the salad – / cherry blossoms.” Thus, spring is evoked by images of flowers, by the Japanese nightingale, or by the lush green willow. Summer comes in the form of the little cuckoo, the short nights, and the lotus. Autumn appears in the crimson leaves, the white dew, and the susuki grass. And winter in the chrysanthemum, the icy moon, and the first drizzle… Over the centuries, poets have compiled these terms into almanacs called saijiki, true emotional encyclopedias of nature, where every phenomenon finds its place in the cycle of the year. More than simply naming the season, the kigo calls for a way of seeing. Bashō, once again: “The white chrysanthemum – / I gaze at it intently: / not a speck of dust.” For him, seeing clearly was the ultimate art. 

Impacted by her time in Japan, this exhibition presents the artist’s own saijiki, or “little map of time,” now adapted to the context of Ceará, the state where she was born and currently resides. For this very reason, the calendar Paula has organized follows neither the four Japanese seasons nor the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere, which have never quite fit Ceará’s semi-arid tropical climate. Her divisions arise from lived experience: the celebrated rainfall that signals the start of the year, the festivities that follow, the wind that picks up in the second half of the year, and the drought that brings it to a close. A year, therefore, that does not begin in January, but rather with the first rains. 

Once the rain has passed, Ceará enters its festive season, from Holy Saturday to St. John’s Day, with the bounty of the countryside and the small tasks that come with it. In Feijão florindo, the rounded leaves pile up like a thick, green carpet on the warm earth, and among them the tiny flowers of the bean plant bloom, like pale pink butterflies with yellow centers: the most delicate part of this plant that, above all, provides sustenance. Separando feijão, on the other hand, shifts focus to the intimate gesture that follows: against an almost white background of vast emptiness, a glass bowl holds the sorted beans, while the pods rest above and a handful is scattered beside them. In the bowl, some beans, floating, appear brighter, while others, more opaque and dull, settle at the bottom. The difference in light between one bean and another reveals that the bean that rises is hollow, while the one that sinks is the good one. Perhaps it will yield a nice creamy green bean stew. 

For centuries, seasonal poetry in Japan was an aristocratic privilege, composed of the same noble imagery centered on the full moon or white snow. It was only with the popular haikai of the Edo period that the almanac opened up to more humble subjects. Thus, dandelions, garlic, ants, beans, “the love of cats,” and, in modern saijiki, even beer and night baseball finally found their way into poetry. The poetic scale, which once descended from the moon, now rose from the ground. No one inhabited that ground like Issa, who dedicated his most famous piece of advice to the snail: “Slowly, slowly, / Climb Mount Fuji, / O snail.” It is from this broad base of the pyramid that Paula’s kigo emerge. Things from the backyard and kitchen are given the same importance that tradition reserved for the sublime. 

Pau de fita, the largest canvas in the exhibition, stands vertically like a mast: from a single point in the night sky, set amid pale and golden stars, colorful ribbons, red, blue, ochre, green, descend and fan out to the orange earthen floor, where tiny figures dance, holding the ends of the ribbons. It is the ribbon dance of the June festivals, the rite of Saint John in which bodies whirl around a pole, weaving and unweaving the colors in a fabric that ravels and unravels. Paula depicts the festival as a cosmic event; the ribbons emanate from the stars, while the community, down below, seems to be weaving the sky itself. It is the only canvas in which the scale is reversed; the collective human gesture takes on grandeur, while everything else in the exhibition could almost fit in the palm of one’s hand. 

Queima de Judas, in turn, involves another ritual. At the center stands the effigy of Judas, with a full head of hair and a beard, a gray vest, and a tie, one arm hanging limply in a white glove; flanking him are two men who turn out to be boys and hold him up, parading him before his punishment. On Holy Saturday in northern Brazil, the cloth effigy of the traitor is beaten and burned in the town square, and the kids carry it through the streets. The celebration, after all, is also a matter for the almanac. Alongside flowers, animals, and celestial phenomena, the saijiki reserves a category for gyōji, observances, both sacred and profane, that mark the passage of time. These are the festivities and processions in which the community gathers in a shared gesture. Poets have celebrated them as well. Issa, in his “New Year”: “My happiness / in this year that begins – / more or less, just average.” A celebration is as seasonal as a cherry tree. 

Carnaúba e lua minguante is the silent reverse side of the festival: against a blue-green, almost monochromatic hue, the carnauba palm stands slender and slightly curved, its silhouette cut out against the sky; its fronds open high above in spiky fans, like dark stars, or like the nocturnal reverse of the ribbons that burst forth in the Pau de fita dance. To the left, the waning moon sinks over the hills; below, the still water of a clear lagoon. The carnauba palm is the “tree of life” of the Brazilian hinterland called the sertão; from it come wax, wood, and food. Euclides da Cunha hailed it as the plant that aids hinterland dwellers. Here, however, it merely exists, reduced to presence and patience. There is still something in it of Rousseau’s dreamlike nocturnal world, with its flat foliage and dreamlike stillness. Something, too, of Tarsila’s Brazilian moonlight, which reinvented the tropical landscape with flat fields of color and solitary forms. And, why not, something of the Japanese woodblock print, with its dark silhouette against a smooth background, the balance of light and dark masses, and the stillness of the outline. 

Once June has passed, a steady wind rises from the east and ushers in the season of vacations and leisurely contemplation. In Jangada ao vento do leste, the wind takes on a physical form: the yellow sail billows, full, and the raft tilts over the churning sea, its bow raised, foam crashing against the orange hull, everything in a state of imbalance and imminent danger. It is a perilous scene; the vessel teeters on the edge of sailing and capsizing. Remember that the raftsman has been the state’s artistic hero since at least the time of Raimundo Cela. Cela made the coastal light and the drama of the jangada (the vessel caught in the surf, with men and sails jumbled into a single whirlwind) the central theme of local painting. In Ceará, the raft is epic. In 1941, rafters from Fortaleza used one of these crossings to sail to Rio de Janeiro and demand their rights, a feat that Orson Welles wanted to film for It’s All True. This endeavor cost Jacaré, a rafter, his life. 

But Paula’s sea is also that of the tiny things it leaves behind on the sand. Coisas do mar arranges, upon the golden sand of the beach and beneath the white lace of the surf high at the top of the canvas, a collection of finds: shells, cowrie shells, a sand dollar, shards of frosted glass, colorful pebbles, each one isolated and precise, as if in a display case. It’s almost a pocket-sized saijiki, not of the seasons, but of a low-tide afternoon; a patient inventory by someone who walks with their eyes on the wet sand and gathers what the wind and water have brought. The same attention as that of the snail, now by the seashore. 

And, in this mid-year respite, the artist herself appears. Autorretrato penteando o cabelo shows Paula standing by a window, her arm raised as she combs her hair, her body and the light rendered through a myriad of tiny brushstrokes that make the entire canvas vibrate, almost dissolving into radiance. It is a quiet interior, imbued with a sense of suspended intimacy, and within it reverberates a gesture that painting has pursued for centuries. It is the woman before the mirror, absorbed in herself, a motif that ukiyo-e elevated to prominence, with its beauties arranging their long black hair before the mirror. Here, gazing at herself, the artist also portrays herself looking: the self-portrait of someone who makes attention her craft. Around her, the middle of the year unfolds in fleeting things. Mangas numa bacia de ágata shows round, ripe mangoes, floating in the water of a translucent vessel. These are fruits of the heat, preserved as if to protect their freshness. There are also cashew leaves gathered in her lap, green alongside yellows and rust-colored hues, the closest thing the sertão has to momiji, the crimson foliage of Japanese autumn. 

Then the wind dies down, the rains grow scarce, and the sertão enters its longest season: the dry season. With it comes a longing for shade. In Sombras de nuvem sobre o mar, tiny touches of blue and cream shimmer as cool patches drift across the top of the painting: shadows that are there and yet aren’t, passing without a trace. A Sombra das mangueiras captures the coolness sought beneath the trees. The dense, dark canopies line up over a scorching ground, orange with sunlight and fallen leaves, and between them, bands of light and shadow descend, a refuge in the midst of the hot day. It is the season at rest, or rather, the body retreating to the coolness. No one embodies this better than Menina deitada na rede, who stretches out in a white curve from one end of the canvas to the other, her face resting on her bent arm, her eyes open and gazing at us, while a black cat stands guard on the ground. Behind her, a tree with a round canopy, each leaf meticulously rendered, evokes that dreamlike frontality of folk art. It is the still, somewhat magical world in which the reclining figure from the entire history of painting reappears as a young woman in the backyard. The same patience of rest is found in the fabric. The hammock, woven on the giant looms of the city of Jaguaruana, has its ornamental pattern painted stitch by stitch – the very pattern whose warp the weavers of Ceará comb and interlace with thousands of threads, hour after hour, in one of the state’s oldest crafts. Paula reproduces the minute weave thread by thread, as if recognizing in the lacemaker a kindred spirit in her own craft. 

Once the rest period has passed, the drought lays bare the bone. Imbuzeiro na seca strips the landscape to its bare essentials. An entire field of parched ochres and golds occupies nearly the entire canvas, crisscrossed in the foreground by black and whitish branches, twisted, devoid of a single leaf. Amid this aridity, a single green canopy persists. It is the imbu tree, which stores water in its roots and remains alive when everything around it has dried up, sustaining people and animals in the harshness of the sertão. Paula distills the season into a single contrast: the vast, lifeless field and the stubborn patch of green; an economy of means that only the drought is capable of achieving. 

But the turning point has its harbingers. In Formigueiro se preparando para a chuva, a line of ants crosses the parched field toward the nest, carrying their burdens beneath a shifting sky. It is the tiniest creature, a prophet, that knows of the rain before we do. In saijiki, what distinguishes a simple kigo from a kidai, the full poetic theme, is the hon’i, or the core of established associations that an image carries. In the Japanese repertoire, geese departing in the autumn, for example, evoke loneliness; dew, tears; the cold winter drizzle, the transience of all things. Facing the world, Issa captured this hon’i of the ephemeral in a single verse: “This world of dew / is a world of dew, / and yet… and yet.” 

Here is what A Flor do mandacaru offers as we conclude our journey. Against a nocturnal backdrop, the greenish-blue of deep water, the columnar arms of the mandacaru rise darkly. From one of them springs the great flower: a white star with pointed petals, blooming in the midst of total darkness, with a dense center of slender, yellowish stamens that seems to hold its own light. Around it, the darkness lightens into a greenish halo, as if the night itself were receding to let it shine. It blooms at night for a single dawn. It opens in the dark, offering its scent to passing bats or moths, and by daybreak it has already wilted. It is the hon’i of the sertão. It speaks to the resilience of what blooms vigorously in the arid landscape and, above all, to the promise, because the mandacaru in bloom, the ultimate symbol of the Brazilian Northeast, announces that the rain is returning. We return to the imminence of water, and the end of the “little map of time” already holds, in its entirety, its new beginning. 

Having been numb for so long, we now turn our eyes to the climate, to the seasons that are falling out of sync, and to a sky we’ve learned to fear in this age of catastrophes. But Paula Siebra tells us that paying attention to the world is already a way of defending it, bringing us back to the heart of natural time without robbing us of any beauty. Her canvases weave the fantasy of a welcoming world, on a domestic scale and filled with restrained affection, where everything seems to have found its exact place. In them lies the promise of a nest-like world: a whole stripped of conflict, where the parts fit together like pieces of a perfect mold, designed so that everything fits. If the world isn’t quite like that, perhaps that is precisely why she paints it, as someone who preserves the image of what is still worth protecting. She teaches us, in the manner of haiku poets, that a cactus flower can convey an entire season, and that traveling across the world to Kyoto can be a way to relearn how to look at one’s own backyard. It is an invitation to rediscover the year and to recognize that even here, in this strange hinterland of Greater São Paulo, every living thing sings its own song, and that time, despite everything, still turns. Over that red roof, it will soon start raining again. 

– Pollyana Quintella