“Pavão de Krishna”, the larger-scale painting presented in this exhibition, makes it possible to enunciate some thematizations, composition methodologies and complex processes of organization of points of view or frameworks that constitute structuring elements of the formidable richness of the pictorial work of Ana Elisa Egreja.

We begin by seeing that we are looking at a natural outdoor environment through half-open glass doors. We can think of the traditional idea of painting — and each painting — as an open window to the world. However, everything here gets complicated. The metaphorical “window” is a door to a room whose architecture we can imagine from the modernist tiles — designed by Athos Bulcão — on the walls that frame the glass door.

The painting is not just what we see outside, beyond the “window”. We also see the place where we are looking, not in its entirety — what room is this, what house and who inhabits it and is looking? — but only through a specific framework that also allows us to imagine that we are perhaps looking at an “Italian-style” stage where a room has been recreated with an opening in the background through which one can see not the “real” but a “theatrical” outer.

We leave the scope of “painting-window about the real” and enter a constructive conception of space that has architectural and theatrical roots. But the anomalies have just begun.

The protagonists are showy peacocks that are outside and inside the space where we think we are. Even more complicated, we see its reflections on the flooded (and therefore reflective) floor of the interior space. Everything indicates that here there are no human characters to tell a story. Nature and construction, exterior and interior are confused and interpenetrate.

The possibility of imagining a narrative is increasingly on the side of the beholder, on our side, abandoned — just as the room seems to be — to the task of guessing what is going on or will have happened. We enter the field of exploration — doubt, suspense, expectation — of what in cinema is called the “off-space”, what we neither see nor know but which we hope will end up revealing the secret of the situation.

We're looking for details, clues that might help us. There are several self-adhesive stickers on the glass. Who glued them — it wasn’t the birds — and when and what can they tell us about these characters who are off?

The prodigious richness of this painting is not offered to us as a search for a solution to a mystery — this is not a detective story — but as a demand for a multiplication of mysteries guided by the pleasures of beauty: the beauty of painting.

The birds can be interpreted according to symbolic matrices and, for the most part, the lamb on the sofa in the painting “Agnus Dei Pictural” — a greater symbol of higher values — but this is just one more possibility. Also on this canvas is the interplay between interior and exterior — stage and window — here organized in a more systematic way. The whimsical framing of the interior space — sofa and table cut off on one side — suggests and almost pushes us to imagine what and who will be on the right of what we see, off.

The lamb as a major symbol dialogues with variations from still lifes with orange fruits and vegetables on a pink formica table that reflects the “real” blind. Elements painted with precious sophistication that is also manifested in the round paintings — “plates” — and small paintings of soap dishes (to which here are added images of towel racks where real, physical embroidered towels are suspended) which are already a consecrated part of the brand image of the author. These smaller paintings are testimonies, “proofs” of an almost intimate domestic experience to which our access, only suggested, remains closed. Where are the bodies?

“Window overlooking the sea – Praia da Barra, BA” has a special value for me. In my personal memories there are many views, through windows, of what I consider the most beautiful beach in the world, Praia do Porto da Barra in Salvador. From now on, my esteemed collection has been enriched by the vision of this new window imagined by the artist. In the larger canvases, the overlapping, in the literal sense, of concrete physical objects — more precisely blinds and curtains — reinforces the passage from the world of window painting to the world of theater painting. The refusal of the illusory transparency of the relationship between reality and its pictorial representation — which in other works was obtained by simulating the effects of frosted or wavy glass, with the combination of both methods of distancing being visible in “Still life with blue vase and daisies” — is emphasized and resignified through the overlapping of real props that take us to the dimensions of scenography and dramaturgy, theatrical — and in the field of visual arts to the assemblage.

Even so, in the absence of human characters and obvious intrigue, perhaps one should not speak of theater. Right. What I am talking about is painting-theatre or the theater of painting.

The only protagonist is the painter whose performance consists of a wonderful, physical performance, which is the act of painting: with the richness of sensitivity and emotions that we recognize in colors, textures, more exuberant gestures and more subtle details, notes of humor or drama. The secondary characters are us, here, in the off space.

If we don't want to be mere extras, we have to imagine the paintings we see in the theater of our own imagination, that will be our privilege and pleasure.

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Text originally written for the exhibition Janelas, Kubik Gallery, Porto, Portugal, 2023