"Marcia's pictorial practice begins as Earth - matter, canvas, paint, surfaces, layers, reliefs, eruptions, geology, scraping, excavations, wear, and archeology - and becomes Cosmos - light, explosion, color, and cosmology. The artist builds a historical past by overlaying coats of paint and then scraping and excavating them layer upon layer as if in an archaeological dig, to reveal the physical memory of the painting itself like one does when dating soil. The technique highlights pictorial layers, accentuates the relief of the canvas, and releases eruptions of light and color that result in a visual vocabulary of cosmic movements and explosions. The geological construction and the archaeological action that follow paradoxically reveal a cosmos.Even if seen as representation, it would be reductionist to limit Marcia Ribeiro’s paintings to visual aspects alone. Her work is the result of actions that are indicial and impasto on canvas as a field of work. The artist does not paint landscapes but instead overlaps layers of paint that make up a pictorial relief landscape that is later eroded to release color and light. It is as if the forces that move the Universe’s matter were tapered into the human scale of art and acted upon the materiality of the pictorial field the same way they work on the cosmic scale. If the human body is one of the forces driven by the Big Bang as Western science declares, then the same original drive that blows up Supernovas and congregates planetary matter seems to drive Marcia Ribeiro to create and manipulate universes inside the cosmogonic perimeter of the canvas.”

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Fabio Morais

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