​ air and water

Katia Canton

​

Anete Ring is an artist who authorizes random doses of wind to blow in the construction process of her paintings. This makes them more full of life, of complexity. And a certain serenity, too.
As in the title of Marshall Berman's book (1), in his work, everything that is solid - paints, canvases, brushes - is composed and dissolves in the composition of ethereal-toned landscapes. The action is configured in the place of the unplanned and becomes the action that carries the look away.
I think that these almost abstract landscapes are true dismantling scenes, in the sense that they take us away from the gaze impregnated with ready-to-consume images, creating gaps within the seething and constant call of the media. They free us from the need for immediate and analytical recognition of the world's images.
Anete Ring's horizons are mysterious because they are made from a combination of reason and intuition, truth and dream, constructive will and the fluency of chance.
She says that the temporality of her painting has no rules. The works can be born quickly or very slowly; they can have great density, subtly revealing the many layers of other paintings that lie beneath what is seen on the surface, or they can be direct, emanating a landscape that configured itself in a certain right economy of brushstrokes. It is interesting to note that only a little painting can build a place, recalls the artist.
This lack of formulas draws a fluid quality to the works, which despite the variety of tones and textures—she can use sand, oil stick and other materials along with acrylic paint—may seem made only of air.
They are works that inhabit the in-between worlds, and place themselves in the half-spaces between figure and abstraction, density and lightness, action and suspension. They are as intuitive as mental exercises in plastic construction.
Here, in this exhibition, other elements start to be thought of as issues of drawing, of painting.  In addition to volatile horizons, in a second series of works, Ring focuses on the sensation of bodies of water. Jellyfish are the inspiration for this other set of works.
Also called jellyfish or water mothers, jellyfish borrow their name from Greek mythology, in which a female character has a face full of snakes instead of hair.
Beauty and danger are at stake in this formal choice.

On second thought, jellyfish are watery forms par excellence. These beings, animals on a boundary between kingdoms, bordering on a vegetable form, take shape in the situation of an eternal struggle between the watery fluidity and the sure danger of the tentacles; between the fragility of a beautiful form and the imminence of poisonous damage.
In Anete Ring's works, this tension gains movement, gesture,  thickness. Here, the artist uses supports that reverberate the transparency of the jellyfish themselves: plastic, acrylic, acetate. They are scratched, grooved and receive lines that detach themselves from the two-dimensional surface, gaining release in space. In this action, Ring accepts the confrontation of a new mechanism of plastic action, remaining, however, in an eternal between-places.
*Katia Canton
Grades:

1-Marshall Berman. Everything that is solid melts into air. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007.

note: this text was written with reference to the ENTRE exhibition, held in October 2012 at AC Galeria.

Kátia Canton is a journalist and art critic. Curator and associate professor at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Master and PhD in interdisciplinary arts from New York University.