Gravura Brasileira

Emotion in multiple languages

Sheila Goloborotko says, “I do prints.” That is a reductive statement; her scope is wide and incorporates a variety of expressions in different media with an emphasis on reflections on life and death. Although she departs from the printing technique, the developments go further out into the conceptual sea. She is an artist involved in the contemporary thoughts that work on a theme not as a visual theme in and of itself but on the social consequences of the theme, how it reveals people’s situation in that realm, and how some artists have sharpened their expressive tools so as to also nourish the critical theories and the thinkers. We have seen Sheila’s work wander into romantic expressions  and visual iteration, I Wish You Were Here, and The Eyes. And again in another couple of different approaches: revealing sadness and loss as in Umm Al-Basatin; the pleasure of the readers’ eyes gazing without limits: in The Eyes and The Eyes-gauze. Two series are unusual paths in the technical and conceptual realm: The Maps and The Finds. The Maps “Miles, Space, Kilometers, Caminhos, Encounter = Chance, Fronteira and Borders” are acetate engravings, scrolls of approximately twenty-one in length by three inches in diameter each, recall the early scrolls, the secret renderings of the world… The Finds are metaphysical encounters she found in the city or by the sea. Things, parts, which look like wire knitting – and which one certainly knows that have gone through much erosion… Therefore, they are The Finds that keep their deep secret, and we cannot know their origins.

Beyond death, suffering and destruction, life too has a significant presence in the artist’s work. Finding objects, salvaging them, accepting them in their anonymity and physical condition is opening the possibility of life to them  – symbolically, deteriorated-abandoned objects are equivalents of distressed, sick people. In the series of artworks titled The Eyes, Goloborotko works on self-reflection, on the body, on her body and on this universal artists’ tool. But mainly through her eyes, Sheila realizes the ritual moment when she discovers some mystery, some communication spot with nature, or something her hand has created with one idea but it expands in multiple directions – without losing the main topic. None of her series are far from the miracle of the gaze, through her eyes she sees and creates; through her eyes we discover hundreds of thousand of possibilities.

At Umm Al-Basatin, Sheila draws a city plan; she focuses on the human target. The artwork’s color recalls the blood, stains all over, the explosion of the bridge, pain, and an invaded city. How does someone think of helping through provoking more death and damage? These pieces would have been specific to Umm Al-Basatin, but the world undoubtedly converted the “round city” into sad coetaneous global art. If Diamonds and Coal is a group of prints that recall nature, they kind of also drive us through Plato’s convex regular polyhedron. The shapes in those prints are not really solid, they are not even hollow, they are flat elements but they acknowledge the wisdom of the edges, vertices, and angles. Recalling Plato’s geometrical classification – so named in homage to the Ancient Philosopher – leads us to Sheila’s philosophical statements. She respects history and works with many of its tools, although she is deeply devoted to the changes at the speed of our time. Another portfolio by Goloborotko is What The Eyes Do Not See, a uniquely interesting installation of prints hanging as pieces of skin – eyes, bones, ears – resting on the various sections of a pliable metal clothesline.

The task of a coetaneous art critic would not be fulfilled without mention of her accomplishments in clay. She presents The Plates in clay – horizontal or vertical relief-like ones. They are abstract harmonic supports for elements of everyday life. The plates are the perfect figure: the circle. On them, a variety of situations develop, one would say theatrical scenes take place on those surfaces. Sheila has frequently done clay artwork. We observe the interrelation between these objects and some of the ones in her prints – traditional and mixed media prints. The Witnesses are twin pieces of the clay ones, and one could also consider them as a brief summary of her works over the last decade – even of pieces not in this catalog. Space, ladder, reliefs, text and even eyes and organic shapes, explosion, bomb, carbon dispersion, tree remembrance, fence behind which people are kidnapped, urban-popular sayings, shadows of what life used to be. Sheila Goloborotko, with her emotions in multiple languages, is one of the artists that help us understand the world.

Graciela Kartofel
Independent Curator/Critic
New York, September 2008