The Dutch occupation of Northeast Brazil in the seventeenth century is not widely known internationally. In Brazil, however, it is often romanticized as a period of progress and development, especially when contrasted with Portuguese colonization. Yet, like other colonial ventures, Dutch Brazil was ultimately a commercial enterprise driven by profit and sustained through exploitative and inhumane practices.

In Balbúrdia—a Portuguese word meaning noise, confusion, or mess—artist Patricia Werneck Ribas revisits this chapter of Brazilian history through collage. By deconstructing prints of well-known paintings by Albert Eckhout and Frans Post—artists sent to Brazil to document its landscape, flora, fauna, and people in service of the colonial project—and reassembling these fragments together with contemporary photographs of Brazil and pieces of painted paper, new hybrid images emerge. These compositions suggest creatures of Brazilian fauna and flora, challenging the colonial gaze and proposing alternative visual narratives.

The paintings of Eckhout and Post played a crucial role in legitimizing Johan Maurits’s authority as both a colonial and cultural leader. Their works contributed to early racial classification systems, embedding social hierarchies within European visual culture. In Brazil, reproductions of these images became some of the earliest visual representations of its people and environments, shaping national self-perception through the eyes of the colonizer.

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The texts are made up of words written individually in the dark with a torch (light painting) and then assembled in Photoshop. |
Inkjet prints on Canson Baryta Paper, various dimensions.

hope_teal

hope_red

hope_pink

hope_blue

Machos

Cultivate

your_mind

inthemood

what_if

melting_away

Tropical_love

still_becoming

Some_things_will_be_all_right

living_in

lalala

Sheshall

How_useful

Embrace

Egos

cannot_help

Accept mortality

Even_latinos

another

endless

are_you

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Press Release
Text by Siobhan Wall
(© Siobhan Wall 2019)

Head (of a woman)

Heads have become central to Patricia Werneck Ribas’s recent work about identity. In the annex of the gallery, she has hung subdued images of the back of her shaved head taken when she was having chemotherapy. These seemingly gender-neutral heads are almost anti-portraits with their minimalistic aesthetic. In contrast, she has hung vividly coloured wigs in the adjoining space. She uses these apparently contrasting forms to explore underlying concerns in women’s lives, drawing on her own experience and memories. This is more than just a collection of personal narratives, however, she will be ‘painting’ the space with artificial highly saturated hairpieces. These straight crimson, purple, blue, yellow locks are her palette; a way to invite the viewer to identify with the glamour of dressing up and to expand on an idea of what it means to be female.

Along with other projects she has worked on, her mixed media work such as Head (of a Woman) is informed, but not confined by feminist thinking. The vividly pigmented strands of hair are only one element in her current work. She uses found objects and her own photographs of the back of her head to create minimalistic pieces that elude easy categorization. Based on her experience of recovery from a serious illness, she uses these images to relate her memories to a deeper understanding of illness and recovery. Using two contrasting pieces of work, she believes that it is in looking at the interstices between one image and another than new meanings emerge. What is missing in the spatial arrangement of the photographs invites a concerned gaze, for example.

Questions of ‘identity’ run throughout her work, a word which is always predicated on defining what we are not as a way of thinking through who we are. She sees the artist as someone who is always making decisions that have strong cultural and social ramifications- whether this is explicit in the artwork or not. Her focus is on inviting the viewer to imagine themselves in the place of the other- as in the way she depicts the back of her head in the centre frame rather than showing us her face.

In some ways, this is a documenting of her relationship to her illness and how she wanted to depict a more universal understanding of the human head.

Installation details at Josilda da Conceição Gallery:

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Angela

Vincent

Noah

Luna

Augusta

Jullie

Wiston

Casper

Nikki

Annika

Amber

Muriel

Rozi

2017

Digital C-prints

For my commissioned portraits, I usually get asked by the subjects if I can do some post-processing, in particular on the skin, in order to make them look better.

Taking this desire for perfection as a starting point, I wanted to subvert the idea of the portrait by creating abstractions, using cloned parts of the face, and randomly disposing them on a blank background.

While image manipulation has become more and more acceptable and, in many cases, a necessary part of image-making, we’re still debating how far we are allowed to go, ethically and realistically.

By only presenting some dots (many of them containing a flaw), I wanted to create abstractions of portraits, where the final image is not revealed and can only be constructed in the viewer’s mind.

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