A BIT OF NOTHING
by Clarissa Diniz
"When Marcia Ribeiro presented her paintings to her classmates and teachers - including me - from the Art Conversations course at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, part of her account revolved around the exercise of producing dust. Not a nonspecific kind of dust derived from the unknown and perhaps millennial historical processes, but dust intentionally and contemporaneously created: pictorial dust. Fascinated by the Universe, the artist seems to experience the cosmic formation in her painting through an almost archaeological gesture: scraping and subtracting the most recent layers of paint, Marcia brings to light the whites that were hidden underneath, illuminating the surface and generating a kind of pictorial dust that becomes one of the central elements of the images that emerge.
Not only do cosmic representations appear through the dust, but a cosmological painting itself is created – a creation system that repeats in its terms the already established modes of the emergence of things. If, on the one hand, Marcia Ribeiro’s images clearly allude to elements and movement (stars, lights, paths, planets, systems, nights, explosions) that make up our very plural imagery of the cosmos, on the other hand, they hide because they choose not to reveal the terms of their formation. In its singular pictorial cosmology, the mysteries of the origins of all we know are reenacted.
In turn, A Bit of Nothing is an eminently analytical method to be experienced: instead of producing fragmented matter - dust - and from it recreating the image of a cosmic unit, in this installation it is the image of an unambiguous corporeality – a human body – that is shredded into a thousand parts that are still duplicated by the mirrored pitch darkness of its surroundings. Composed of hundreds of small vases, tubes and other glass containers that hold the chemicals that make up our bodies (oxygen, carbon, calcium, potassium, hydrogen, chlorine, sulfur, sodium, among others), the installation sculpts a body in the air that is in everything elusive, evanescent and therefore infinite. In this kind of representation, Marcia Ribeiro does not create, as she does in her paintings, only the image of a body in a constant movement of boiling, condensation, and sublimation. A Bit of Nothing is fundamentally a small allegory about life and its cosmologies."
IN BETWEEN
by Fabio Morais
"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.”
ARROBOBOI
by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra
"Marcia Ribeiro paints since 2001 and recently is exposing her artworks to a broader public. The name and work of Hilma af Klint came to my mind in our conversations either for the pictorial language relating to both artists and the secrecy involving the production of their work. This introduction created diverse parallels between their practice establishing a fluid network of knowledge that involved Anthroposophy as the educational (Waldorf Schools), therapeutic, and creative system established by Rudolf Steiner merging with sunsets and sky colors at Ipanema, Copacabana and Bahia Beaches. In “Ascensão (Ascension), 2016” there’s an eerie presence of white glowing bubbles made of her scratching of pigment on canvas over a dark blue background suggesting vaporized molecules of water bursting from the earth ground into the open universe. Then horizontal color lines construct a gradation between orange, red and yellow which can be minimalistic representation of the cores of our planet. It’s an extremely physical subject that leds to the existence of an objective, intellectually and comprehensible spiritual world. The same patterns of circular ghostly scratches of pigment appear again in “Fluxo 1 (Flow 1), 2015” constructing an open membrane that shows a reality behind a greenish sea with an otherworldly hole in it and a pink sky. It’s an ode to water cycles that involves how water evaporates from the surface of the earth, rises into the atmosphere, cools and condenses into rain or snow in clouds, and falls again to the surface as precipitation."
FIXED ONLY TO THE NAIL WALL
by Clarissa Diniz
'Cosmic formation, where even dust is not surplus, is performed in the painting of Marcia Ribeiro. Her constitution takes place as an archaeological gesture: scraping and subtracting the latest layers of painting, the artist brings to light the whites behind her, illuminating the surface and generating a pictorial dust that becomes one of the central elements of the images that They emerge. Thus there is not a representation of cosmic elements, but a cosmological experience itself - a system of creation which, in its own terms, repeats the already established modes of the
emergence of things, and especially of painting.'