In my first visits to Maya Weishof's studio at the Pivô Residence in early 2019, her obstinate handling of a large scissors, different colored pencils and some brushes called my attention. It looked like some non-choreographed dance, of little understanding to passers-by in the halls, but not to the drawings scattered along the walls of the cubicle studio, since they always know what that is all about.  

To Maya, some drawings are premises to paintings; others, are abandoned promises. The sketches on notebook pages coexist with ongoing paintings and others drying among  papercuts and books sprinkled with paint drips.  

How does all this connect? The dust in downtown São Paulo makes the sellotape stripes lose its glue and the flying papers seem to morph into fragments of bodies, little monsters, talking heads, and all sorts of non-identified anthropomorphic shapes jumbled on her canvases. In Maya Weishof’s work, everything is interconnected but never pasted together. Her images are entangled on a free, frenzied rhythm and look as if they are always up for a change. From James Ensor to Peter Doig, from The Ugly Duckling to Jewish traditions, Maya’s lysergic (but not psychedelic) compositions follow a peculiar palette, she is a sort of subtropical Sonia Delaunay which moves – elegantly and irreverently – between scatology and eroticism, haute couture and the underground.

Her fellow citizen from Curitiba, Paulo Leminski, wrote: 

What is the use of painting
if not to convey
precisely the searching
of what it can best portray
while handling forty 
enigmas times seventy?

I always prefer enigma to undeniable evidence. And in order to talk about Maya Weishof’s curling practice we chose some shared exercise, some sort of free association game where drawing and writing get together at a place that stops before argument and objective description. “There was never such a thing, a blank page. Ultimately, they all cry out, so loud as to be pale”³, says Leminski in another poem. And the starting point was exactly that: to overlap repertoires, affections, previous conversations and new digital sharing that took place from the impossibility to visit the artist and see the paintings due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Maya sent me a number of works that are part of the Espelho Espanto (Mirroring Astonishing) exhibition at Simões de Assis Gallery. We chose to talk about ten drawings, considering them as possible starting points to her unique universe, the so-called testimony-drawings that hold perforated themes and are constantly reconfigured.

A few days before the montage of the exhibition I finally saw the pieces in person. It was the first time I was facing recently finished paintings in so many months. I could finally talk to the artist without any electronic mediation, and see the drawings I had been writing about.  I walked back home with my eyes overwhelmed by Maya’s colors, and left there some words I had been carrying in my pockets: we went on dwelling thresholds and talking about painting.