Gravura Brasileira

one of those sublime places

There is a poem in this exhibition catalogue among the twelve series of works created by the artist Sheila Goloborotko that addresses an “imaginary” city that would be called Baghdad. It is a place that would not have been “mapped” in our imagination. But from what it is possible to capture from
the poem it is about a “city-orchard” or an “orchard-city” that is wrapped in a mist, and hidden in
our memory. Perhaps this is one of those sublime places that we internally cultivate and that we guard for ourselves only. The trees are our thoughts and the fruits are our most intimate wishes. The orchard
is formed by vestige-trees, which build an archive where we store the fruits gathered in our passage through this world and it is in a way accumulated in our memory, in the form of life experiences.

In a society in which currently everything is controlled including our thoughts, this orchard becomes our most safe refuge. An oneiric place that allows us to dream about a fantastic world like the ones we see in this artist’s prints, made up of spectral shadows, dilacerated hearts, mirroring of the self, eyes that curiously look at us, brains that represent our archival memory, cells that compose bodies on paper, ladders that take us nowhere, maps and tracks traced on acetate in which words appear disconnected but are loaded with meanings and remain in the subjective plane of our emotions.

This world created by Sheila Goloborotko’s prints also forms an orchard of images where she guards her deepest feelings, most significant wishes, greatest doubts, biggest fears and most painful remembrances. Therefore, she exposes traces of her intimacy that compose the cosmography of her inner self, loaded with her history and her internal construction. A city of many orchards is seen in her work.
The most recent image I have of Baghdad, is of a city that was seen from far away in the television screen, located somewhere in the orient of our geographical notion. It was on one evening of March 2003. Baghdad was in the dark and its sky, was curdled by bright points. These fireballs left the city burning for one more night as it was bombarded in that war.

Umm Al-Basatin or “the mother of the orchards” in English is the title of one of the twelve series of prints, created in 2007 and presented in this exhibition. There are ten prints on paper and two prints on metal, all small format and roughly cut, in which the same drawing or form appears repetitively and vaguely reminds us of a target, or the plan of a circular city. What differentiates one from the other are the warm colors printed in the background in varied earthy tones inspired by the colors of
the sand and the desert’s ground. It would have been an arid and dry field, the one described by Sheila in these prints, distant from that initial suggested image of a green orchard, sprinkled by the yellows and reds of the fruits shining in the sun. One realizes when viewing this graphic grouping, a political intention in the artistic action — desire for the artist to position herself in the questions that torment the world.

…

The artist was born in São  Paulo, graduated in architecture, in the beginning of the 80’s and collaborated
with Otávio Roth setting up Handmade Studio, in São Paulo where she learned papermaking. In 1983
she moved to New York, where she established her studio where she concentrates on her production and research. She has been awarded the Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant Award for the past six consecutive
years. She was a member of Brooklyn College’s faculty and currently teaches at Pratt Institute, also in
New York. Pratt is a highly prestigious school founded over one hundred years ago to develop the artistic manual practices of the time. The graphic arts today still deserve a special distinction in the school system where it preserves its old precepts — the craftsmanship and collaborative spirit. Sheila Goloborotko teaches an open course in printmaking in which she integrates into the creative process collaboration amongst students and teacher.

The artist also maintains a “laboratory”, Goloborotko’s Studio, founded in 1989 in Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York. In this studio she develops the project, Hands and Eyes on Printmaking, focused on emerging
talents. This project became a landmark since it brings together artists interested in creating works based on collaboration and innovation in printmaking. This place and Pratt have something in common
that reminds us of the idea of printmaking studios being “kitchens” of creation and knowledge. And this is one of the most praiseworthy characteristics of these types of working spaces. They are centers of encounters and exchanges. Printmaking, still is in the best sense, something for the craftsperson (even when the artist intends to work with the new digital media). The printmaker generally speaking does not long to be the “greatest artist”, but within an ethical attitude, the printmaker longs to be before anything else a good artist loyal to their visual and poetic proposal.

The passion printmaking has provoked in artists and collectors (generally enthusiasts of the technique)
and its outstanding presence in the 20th century Brazilian art was, to say the least, peculiar since it achieved a level of development as hybrid language in the end of that same century. The artist Sheila Goloborotko, is one of these artists passionate with what she does — printmaking full-time.

This language, the most open one to hybrid with many other languages, has a fundamental role in art’s dissemination, political activism and collectionism.

This exhibition presents the most recent production by the artist, and it shows the plurality of the experimental methods she used in the creation of the prints. Sheila Goloborotko is one of these artists
that made a choice to develop a graphic ouvre throughout her career. However, differently from many
that do not manage to get away from being stuck as “technical and crafty” this artist brings conceptual
fundamentals to her art by not allowing her technical skills to become the ultimate goal of the work.

Her prints protrude from walls, dislocate from paper onto surfaces such as acetate, metal wire is used to “stitch” images and facts. The graphic elements and the plates used in the prints vary from one series to the next. Not sticking to any traditional language, etching is the graphic technique that works only as a support for her poetic oeuvre. Unique situations or different obstacles are transposed in the generation of each print.

They are simulations of knowledge that deals with the poetics of what one has lived, and experienced. In the series The eyes, of 2006, with the simplest representation of an eye, the artist repeats to exhaustion this drawing. Always the same one observing us beneath the plane of the paper as if it was somewhere in another side of the world — as if these sheets of paper attain life or as if they contain a life that peers at us.

They are small blue eyes that curiously observe us.

Ricardo Resende
São Paulo, September of 2008