Milhazes Faces Fears And Breaks Circles
Beatriz Milhazes used to fear diagonals. “They were disturbing,” she said, “pushing you out of the canvas.”
Over the last two years, however, the Rio-based Brazilian artist has been exploring those angular lines in her paintings and found that they actually gave her signature circles a three-dimensional quality — making them into globes, evoking the natural world and the planet, which she had increasingly come to appreciate during the pandemic.
The results are now on view at Pace Gallery in Manhattan, Ms. Milhazes’ first solo exhibition since she joined the gallery in 2020.
“It’s about experimenting with new things and challenging yourself,” said Ms. Milhazes, 62. “I needed this kind of a provocation — to introduce something that you fear is a good thing to do. And diagonals are something I always feared, the unbalancing they create. That’s why I found I needed to face it.”
“It’s such an important moment for us to talk about the human,” she continued. “We really need peace and love. The spirituality, the sensibility, the poetry — all these possibilities of renewing things.”
The exhibition, “Mistura Sagrada” (“Holy Mix”), includes 10 large-scale paintings, as well as an expansive mobile sculpture. These works are identifiable for the vibrant colors and kinesthetic geometry that have long marked Ms. Milhazes’ oeuvre. But something else is also at work.
“A spinning circular energy has taken over the whole picture,” said Marc Glimcher, the president and chief executive of Pace. “They’re way more muralistic. It feels a lot more like the history of Latin American muralism.”
Mr. Glimcher said Ms. Milhazes has been a pivotal figure, melding the “rigorous Modernist history of Brazilian art with this personal history and embrace of celebration.
“She created a new language,” he added.
Ms. Milhazes said she has several sources of inspiration, in particular Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), who was influenced by Paris as well as her native São Paulo.
Ms. Milhazes’ work also brings to mind Brazilian artists of the 20th century, including Lygia Clark and Ubi Bava as well as the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.
“She’s trying to stabilize the wildness of the Brazilian landscape and to make it have a kind of order to it,” said Richard Armstrong, the outgoing director of the Guggenheim in New York. “She’s not able to present Brazil in all of its flaming glory; she cools it down.”
While there is a playful, explosive exuberance to her work, Ms. Milhazes said all of her choices are conscious and deliberate. She is using a mathematical precision. “I’m a very rational person,” she said. “I develop a kind of a system. I need the structure very rigid.”
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960 under the former military dictatorship in Brazil, Ms. Milhazes said her mother taught art history at a university and her father was a lawyer.
Ms. Milhazes started out studying journalism at Hélio Alonso University. But it didn’t feel right, and her mother suggested she transfer to Parque Lage Visual Art School.
“When I entered the art school, it was like I received a mission,” Ms. Milhazes said. “I didn’t have any doubt that that is what I wanted for my life.”
In the 1990s, she developed a collaging technique whereby she paints on a transparent sheet of plastic that she then sticks to the canvas and peels off, imprinting the design.
The Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff brought Americans to visit Ms. Milhazes’ studio, including Mr. Armstrong, then a curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“It was just astonishing,” Mr. Armstrong said. “The delicacy of her technique, the vibrancy of her color — the pictures sang the moment I looked at them.”
Ms. Milhazes’ work is influenced by her connection to Brazil: the botanical gardens and the Tijuca forest; the Rio Carnival; Bossa Nova; the ocean.
“A lot of her collages are made with source material that she has found in favelas around Rio — old candy wrappers, discarded items from local consumer culture,” said Adam Sheffer, a dealer who brought Ms. Milhazes to Pace when he was working at the gallery. “Also her technique by which she is using these rubbed stencils allows it to have a grittiness.”
With her new body of work, Ms. Milhazes said she has returned to figuration, in particular to flowers. “It’s about nature — colors, possibilities, life and death rituals,” she said.
“When you really look at a flower, you see how many details and colors there are inside it,” she added. “I wanted to have this practice again. If I can bring some life to people, I am pleased.”