The present exhibition by Ana Prata seems to divide itself into two sets of works of very different dimensions and genres, to some extent even antithetical. However, if we examine the works carefully, what seemed contradictory turns out to be much more complex. On the one hand are the 33 portraits on paper: small, intimate, over a white background, mainly in marker, but also in ballpoint pen, dry pastel, oil pastel, colored pencils, charcoal and graphite. In this series titled “Retratos da Bia/Portraits of Bia”, from 2016, the wide, colorful outline stands out most, as if Ana were in a hurry to register the pose of the model before her, or as if she were rehearsing to draw like a child again. More than observation drawings of the same person––Bia, who was the artist’s assistant that year––they are records of everyday domestic performances, such as raising your arms over your head, holding your chin in your hand, sitting cross-legged, closing your eyes, tying your hair into a high ponytail, etc. Before being a relationship between artist and model, the relationship seems more like that of a director and actress at a small theater, as if it were only possible to develop the character through staging, like Paula Rego in her work with Lila Nunes, her friend, assistant, and favorite model for decades. With one decisive difference: while the relationship between the Portuguese painter and her model continues for decades, leading to a thickening of the nexus between performative staging and pictorial representation, the relationship between Ana and Bia, in order to reach the type of figuration seen here, needed a certain nimbleness––or, more precisely, a leggerezza. Ana de-dramatizes what, in Paula Rego, would resolve itself into a propensity for the tragic.

On the other side, are the two recently made wooden folding screens: large, imposing, painted in oil and spray. They impose themselves on the exhibition space, intruding on the space. Since they are all composed of three wood panels, they could be set up as triptychs––but Ana didn’t always want that. Only one of the folding screens has a tripartite structure on one of its sides, with a different painting for each of the three panels, each painting produced from two dominant figures––a triangle for the first panel, going left to right, and a half moon for the next two––which almost overlap monochromatic backgrounds, in a game of contrasts: red on pink, black on gray, green on blue. The resulting compositions are reminiscent of Volpi, not only for the colors and the arrangement of geometric shapes in space, but also for their apparent brushstroke. In the other paintings (the other side of this same panel and the two sides of the other panel), Prata uses the folding structure as if it were a single painting. Front and back show discrepant paintings, which seem, at first sight, not to dialogue with each other––which, to a certain extent, replicates the tension established in this exhibition between the folding screens and the portraits. The painting on the back of the screen with the triangles and half moons arranged in a uniform pattern, brings a looser, more irregular and less clean composition, unconcerned with contours or removing dripped paint.

The other folding screen, in turn, contrasts, on one side, a pattern that evokes Matisse––not by chance, a book by the artist was on Prata’s worktable when I visited her studio––to the most figurative painting of the set of folding screen panels, which dialogues with the series of simple boats in waterscapes that have been present in the Prata’s production, and whose main representative is perhaps “Passeio de barco no canal/Boat ride on the canal” (Paul Klee), from 2013, which, as given away by the title, is a reinterpretation of Klee. This painting does not occupy the entire surface, in contrast to what occurs on its other side and on the other panel. In the shape of a trapeze and centered on the middle panel, it has the elements that make it a nocturnal seascape: the little boat, the strong colors indicating darkness, a triangle standing in as a moon (while at the same time opening the work to a horizon of abstraction) and two shapes at the bottom, elliptically triangular, which I like to imagine as the fins of large sharks threatening the boatman’s peace. By folding the screen, the side panels become pure color movement.

On the panels, Prata placed small canvases; some with abstract patterns, others with figures, like a bouquet of flowers in the style of Redon or a wave like Hokusai. Thus, she also puts the wooden screen panels to work, assuming the role of support, a false wall, a folding, portable wall, or a large canvas on which she not only paints but also hangs other paintings.

The theater that Prata stages in this exhibition, although based on a comprehensive and at the same time, rigorous and inventive rethinking of the tradition of drawing and painting, aspires to the traveling theatre troupe, transforming itself with each presentation, assembling, disassembling and reassembling at its will, by incorporating the surrounding elements (sometimes reaching the limits of the readymade) and by professing simplicity where complexity overflows. It is, therefore, precisely the theater—or, more precisely, the staging—that seems to connect what, at first, might seem disparate: the portraits and the folding screens. A theater that allows itself to be seen in each detail of the works presented here: in its own constitution processes (the relationship between artist and model), in the dialogue with the great masters (Volpi, Matisse, Klee, etc.), in the superposition of small canvases on folding screens (causing them to oscillate between the conditions of autonomous paintings and something like wallpaper), and even in the mode of exhibition, that is, in the places the works take up in space and, consequently, in the interaction with other works. In short, it is a theater in which roles are never precisely or once-and-for-all defined and can be rearranged according to the moment.

Finally, we cannot lose sight of the fact that between one series and another, there is another “portrait”: no longer small and intimate, or drawn on paper, but an immense elephant—the figure par excellence of the touring circus—painted on a linen screen even bigger than the folding screens. Of all the portraits on view, it is the only one that appears against a non-neutral background. The animal hovers over a geometric composition that recalls the patterns found on the big tops or on the clothes of the acrobats so often represented by Picasso. It is an image that is amplified like the folding screens, but two-dimensional again—a two-dimensionality, however, that seems to arise precisely from the projection of the painting onto three-dimensional structures through the folding screens. This elephant, (with the adjective “fool” written at the bottom, in caption format), seems to function as an allegorical configuration not only of the tensions that organize this exhibition (the main one being the very relationship between folding screens and portraits, which is, ultimately, a new way of re-proposing the issue of fitting between figure and background, which is central to modern and contemporary painting), but also a procedure dear to Ana Prata, a certain elephantiasis that usually guides the way she deals with the artists with whom she dialogues: by incorporating elements and figures from other people’s works, she almost always expands them. This is what happens with the aforementioned Klee, with the Picasso on a folding screen displayed in the Lago Gallery at Palácio do Catete, in Rio de Janeiro—or even here, with the folding screens in the style of Matisse: in Ana Prata’s work, they are transformed into real folding screens. The folding screens allow us to realize that expansion is the first step for such elements to gain shape—and, removed from the wall, becoming themselves walls, in a blurring between being wall or artwork, they come to exist more clearly in space. Ana Prata’s folding screens are like harbingers of the living beings that the works simultaneously want to be—and know they aren’t. Situated at the end of the exhibition, the elephant, with its huge body, its huge ears, and its trunk with a life of its own, seems, not by chance, to be yet another screen among screens, an unfolding and pictorial animal, so akin to that “imposing and fragile” elephant which Drummond saw come together and apart after day.