“With eyes open, he seems to still be seeing the frightening images of his dream.”
— Jean Delumeau, History of Fear in the West, 1300-1800: A City Under Siege, 1978

I.

The history of Western art, since it began, has typically divided artists into two broad categories: draftsmen and colorists. It is not unusual, in that history, to favor the first to the detriment of the latter. Thus, they say, the history of art was born: Vasari, referred to as the father of the discipline, identified a primacy of calculation and measurement in the Florentine artists; among them, the birth of perspective and the rebirth of the classical proportions coincide with the emergence of modern rationalism. “Pittura è cosa mentale,” [painting is a thing of the mind] as Leonardo said. Overlooked in this history, however, are the Venetian artists, for whom “pittura è cosa corporale” [painting is a thing of the body]. Surrendering to the plasticity of the material and the thickness of color, they settled well into their reputation as being instinctive, spontaneous, and dramatic, with work that gives an outlet to the hidden mysteries of the unconscious. In Venetian Renaissance painting, special attention is given to the senses, especially touch, manifested through the representation of flesh and textures, a product of the dissolution of the line; Venetian painting was never afraid of the night, or shadows; we do not see any effort of synthesis: questions are questions and serve to be experimented with, with patches of color, blurs, and decomposed boundaries. In Venetian painting, the line has no beginning or end; they are always spaces of sensory experience, open to the most vaporous and profound qualities that color can reach. It is thus fair to say that an expressive, visceral, and deliriant painting tradition was born in Venetian art, whose medium is the materiality of color. Maya Weishof’s is part of that tradition.

The origin of Maya Weishof’s painting lies in color and the color that she chooses. She has no figures that are not made of color, just as there is no empty space not filled with multicolored waves. It is through color that the spiral of her gaze is unleashed: there are no limits, purity does not exist, and straight lines are rigorously profaned, with the confidence of someone who trusts in the energy of their paintbrushes. In the depths of the color, we come across human forms, from where everything radiates and towards which everything converges, always through color. It is in color that the artist, with the utmost care, develops the cyclic imprecision of her universe: it is there, where everything is possible and nothing is true, where signs of life, ecstasy, and meditation appear. In each trace, each gesture, each chunk of accumulated paint, the painting raises again a series of questions on its existence: Who am I? What am I made of? What do I show? More than a simple exercise of metalanguage, these are internal questions of the painting itself, touching on the nature of what it is and not what it represents. Thus, the painting renounces any effort at mimesis in order to construct itself as a language, like an infinite repertoire of untranslatable, unreproducible, and unspeakable codes. The painting is what it is.

II.

The Tomb of the Diver is a series of seven ancient paintings, the most well-known being a fresco depicting a naked man, arms and legs outstretched, launching himself into a lake. It is from here that Maya Weishof extracts the central figure of Voando às Cegas [Flying Blind]. This work has the power to sharpen our perception of the Etruscan fresco by emphasizing its iconography, associated with fluid mechanics. In the Roman language, urinarius, derived from the Indo-European prefix wódr̥, evokes the idea of flooding, swamps, constant rain. The verb urinari, in turn, designates the act of diving or swimming underwater. In Maya Weishof’s work, the ability of the diver, urinator, to defy the surface tension of fluids and overcome the resistance of its viscous matter, meets jubilation and pleasure. This liquid universe of impermanent bodies without skeletons, which fill any gap or interstice, stimulates the artist as much as the transitional state of the diver, between above and below, between life and death: it is this state of imprecision, of almost-ness that feeds her interest in inchoative images, manifested in her predilection for dusks and dawns, when the night is no longer so dark and the day no longer so clear.

The diver in Voando ás Cegas also restores from his archaeological reference the psychic force of fear of death and the end of the world. In the end, the diver is the symbolic form of the point between here and the beyond, a figure of communication between two worlds, one that exists with eyes open and the other that exists with eyes closed. This is what happens in Quem tem sol nunca tem noite [He Who Has Sun Never Has Night], a work that recovers the fear of seeing the sun disappear forever on the horizon, transforming the dream into a voluminous mass in which images reorganize themselves without any commitment to the real. In this work, a sleeping female figure dreams about the end of the world. Figures of Judgement Day emerge, framing a window where the sun is presented in its maximum ambiguity. The compressed figures of Michelangelo, who was much less concerned with the intimate personality of his characters than with the pathos of their emotions, translate, on the one hand, the nature of the woman’s dream, pursued by the apocalyptic drama and, on the other, the nature of the artist’s problem, pursued by the history of painting. This is why she dispenses with games of light and dark and renounces surrealist formulas. Night, as the deprivation of sight, is a problem of painting resolved in the direct confrontation between work and artist.

III.

In a well-known passage from his Essays, Michel de Montaigne compared his work to “grotesques, which are fantastical paintings, which have no other merit than variety and strangeness. What are these, in truth, if not grotesques and monstrous bodies, put together like diverse members, without a determined figure, without other order or connection or proportion if not casual?” The same could be said of Maya Weishof’s paintings: the indeterminate nature of the figures, the non-indication of the planes, the complete splitting of the referential function of the line, the absence of fixed markers of time, the plurality of themes, the crumbling of the linear narrative, all, in her work, seems to want to emphasize not the forms, but the relationship between the forms, not limits, but the overflowing of limits, leading us to the imposition of the great histories and the apogee of the ornament. What was once a border, frame, excess, is now the raw material of painting, a privileged space for reflection on the trivial and mundane things that fill life’s lacunas. For only ornaments offer the possibility of reassembly from the shards of history in a place where delirium and the libidinal force surpass reason as the prerogative for confronting the world.

In Maya Weishof’s work, color, an irreducible component of representation, serves the ornament like letters serve language. It is from color that she takes advantage of the germinative force of the vegetable, from which symbols and enigmas arise, and is found in her painting, with the sinuous curves of the apparent entrails. The painting’s erotic force seems to come from a mysterious, invisible, unrepresentable, transcendental force found within the body and emanates from it like a form devoid of sharpness and functionality. Things bend in the ornament, giving rise to labyrinthine paths that capture the eye. So it is with her painting, when we suddenly realize that the extension of the figure is us.