MENDES WOOD DM - Inside the Studio Patricia Leite *1955 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Inside the Studio Patricia Leite *1955 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil   Patricia Leite's relationship to her studio is charged with a romantic energy that inevitably finds its way into her works. The artist pursues the imperceptible instant, obsessively trying to capture twilight or a ray of morning light piercing through a crack in a window. The gradual progression and effect of light, the way it changes tone and intensity, reveals itself in the process of Leite's practice. By overlapping layers of paint on wood, Leite repeatedly layers memory on top of memory in order to recreate her own painterly reality. Her process begins with photographs either taken by her or sent to her by friends. Leite prints them manually at home and begins a process of subtle blending between figuration and abstraction. By amalgamating fragments of an image with her own memory, Leite's practice begins to reveal different dimensions of depth that are constrained by the boundaries of a two-dimensional medium. The artist reproduces distant, light-emitting objects such as stars, the moon, or fireworks on the surface of her compositions, bringing these bursts of light into the foreground of the pictorial plane, creating a simultaneously naif but mesmerizingly complex interplay of the brightest lights and darkest shadows, poetic in their simplicity but nonetheless visually challenging and emotionally rewarding.   "This matter seems to run at me, and I keep trying to translate this uncontrollable light, the last light of the day, the moment that the lamp goes up, you know? It is a challenge for me to transform paint into an instant." –  Patricia Leite   For Leite, more than anything, the most important aspect of her painting is that it pays tribute to memory. The artist always mentions experienced moments, songs played, books read, paintings seen. It is as if Leite wants to register the essence of memory. Her work moves away from the notion of painting being a reliable method of accurate representation and liberates itself to represent the impressions and mutations of memory and experience that we accumulate throughout our lives. She believes it impossible to paint light without understanding time.   Patricia Leite (Belo Horizonte, 1955) lives and works in São Paulo. Her most recent solo exhibitions include: Patricia Leite, The Arts Club, London (2020); Parks and Other Pretexts, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2019); lusco-fusco, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2018). Olha pro céu, meu amor, Mendes Wood DM Brussels, Brussels (2018). Her works has been included in group exhibitions such as: Terra Trema, Thomas Dane, Naples (2019); Mínimo, múltiplo, comum, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018); Aprendendo Com Dorival Caymmi - Civilização Praieira, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2016); The Circus as a Parallel Universe, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2013); Outra Praia, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2005).   See works here

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