![]() ![]() Afterwards, the web loosens, slowly dissipates to make place for shafts of light, free falling, the call of emptiness, essential, vast nothingness. There’s a painting called Checkmate painted by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, that used to hang in the Louvre Art Museum in Paris. ![]() This mesh of paint can also be seen as images of nets, cages – not unlike Alberto Giacometti evidently, as they were created during her years of exile in Brazil, they are first and foremost about insanity, violence, and oppression, as made manifest by their titles: Le Désastre ou la Guerre (1942) L’Incendie ou le Feu (1944) La Bataille des couteaux (1948). Her “labyrinths” evoke the same feelings of fear and loss, or of enlightenment and dreams. The great chess master Paul Morphy sees the Moritz Retzsch 'Checkmate' painting: the 'One More Move' story Our on-line research discovered many video and print references to modern day sermons that tell the story of how the young man in the Retzsch chess art painting (often referred to as The King) had one more move to win the game. However, it is rather difficult to mention labyrinths without bringing Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka to mind. The artist, here, rubbing shoulders with both Renaissance painters, who erected cathedrals of perspective, and cubists, who grappled with the same questions. ![]() This network, which can be understood as a metaphor for reflection, is fundamentally an exploration of perception. Whether her paintings begin as a still life, empty room, or bustling metropolis, the canvas takes on labyrinthine qualities: a network in the shape of a spider web, a warped checker board, where the eye wanders, gets lost, goes dim or becomes illuminated. The places and objects of her childhood populate an inner world brought to life in her pictorial art: libraries and theatres, musical scores and chess games, alleys tiled with azulejos and the ornamental ironwork of Parisian architecture. In her paintings, this topography is augmented by transitional and imaginary cities. The city reigns supreme over the life and work of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Lisbon, cradle of her existence, where, as a solitary child, she developed a taste for observation and contemplation Paris, adopted capital and dwelling as of 1928, where she would meet gallery owner Jeanne Bucher*, champion of her work, and Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes, her life partner Rio de Janeiro, city of exile where they would both escape to in 1940, only to return to Paris seven years later. ![]()
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