Gravura Brasileira

Ana Elisa’s landscapes scratch transmission towers on a remote horizon, whereas the arbor and the fountain on another print inscribe the viewer into an involving garden: two sorts of scenery, indicating an insisting action which, however, escapes one’s sight. It is up to still life to give meaning to it: a book by Holbein, domestic animals’ skulls, crystals or rich fabrics, each one of them allegorizes this action as figures of the sixteenth century vanitas, therefore, death, collected in cabinets of curiosities as wonders back then. Ana Elisa exhibits them, and also writes them, perinde ac cadaver, tu duca, now making the dead ruler over the paper, now enlisting them in a legion which corners its supposedly natural predator in a dance of death. Parody, still in the sixteenth-century profusion of Holbein, Brueghel, of the dead which Ana Elisa take out from drawers in order to draw from life, giving them life, first in drawings, then in prints, with or without pins fastening them to a styrofoam stage. The predator turns into prey: theatre of nature, flies devouring the frog which devours them, theatre of art, bringing the dead back to life. The indifference to the active and the passive, to life and death, is allegorized by the round dance, the circus.
Leon Kossovitch, 2002