Portrait of the artist. © Rosana Ricalde
Brazilian artist Rosana Ricalde uses the word as image. Born in Niterói, Brazil in 1971 and educated in Engraving at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the artist is still influenced by engraving and the discipline it taught her.
Her work is not done quickly without process, but rather in a structured, methodical way. By meticulously dissecting and re-assembling chosen texts, the artist destroys their original structure, creating visual intersections of disconnected words.
Ricalde draws inspiration from the world and its vastness. In the series Invisible Cities, for example, she builds blueprints of various cities by patiently extracting words and phrases from Italo Calvino book of the same name. It provided Ricalde with her first encounter of maps, spurring her love for literature and led her to read The Travels of Marco Polo. Thus, literature, travel and documentation contribute to all aspects of Ricalde’s work.
The artist takes the idea of storytelling onboard as the engine that drives life forward. In her earlier work she took lines from the writings of Italo Calvino, José Saramago, Emily Dickinson, and Michel Foucault, blending the pattern of these texts into the pattern of the weave. Meaning and structure. Text and texture. In her work, the boundaries between visual poetry and drawing become permeable.
Ricalde’s latest works take this one step further. To a certain extent they delve behind and beneath the text, the artist takes up the invisible threads that are, it could be said, the essence of life. With her brush, she traces the yarns and threads that were not only used in traditional handicrafts like weaving and embroidery to make warming, decorative fabrics, but also to create pictures of the world, to tell stories and relate to history. Stories like the one about Eden, a place of bliss that both the Islamic as well as the Christian world see as a beatific garden. Traditional Persian rugs were created as images of this exhilarating paradise with its refreshing waters and colorful floral splendor, which must have seemed magical to all those people whose lives were normally characterized by the desert’s monochrome.
Rosana Ricalde picks up on these carpet patterns and with them, something in the way thoughts are expressed, life stories are told, reality is put in order and explained in the world. In her images she draws upon the vocabulary of the forms and colors of traditional weaving and embroidery. With paint and brush, she brings lush floral designs into existence, adorned with fragrant lace, allowing the hidden language to be revealed that recalls the faraway civilizations, stories and histories associated with these patterns, moving across time.
Residencies in Croatia, the Netherlands and São Tomé e Príncipe in Africa have contributed to the artist’s interest in culture and led her to international acclaim.
Ricalde had exhibitions in the Kawasaki City Museum (Japan), Museu da Cidade de Lisboa in Guimarães (Portugal), Contemporary Art, Stenersen Museum in Oslo (Norway), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam in Havana (Cuba) and was represented by Baró Galeria, São Paulo, at the 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach.