Moonlight Mood, 2018
Photo: Lance Brewer, 2018 | Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM
Collection
Oil on wood
220 x 160 x 5 cm
Patrícia Leite’s strong use of lines and contours condenses landscapes into minimal, yet strikingly evocative forms. Resulting in a style which draws variously on both abstract and figurative modes of painting, her work deals with the relation between memory and image-production, and the role of affect in manipulating our visual recollections of time and place. Often, finer textural details are exchanged for smooth planes of block colour, producing what appear to be idyllic yet ambiguous imaginings of pasture and firmament. This ambiguity of location, however, is offset by her work’s acute sensibility to atmosphere; the vividness of her paintings stems less from their being true to life in a representational sense, than from Leite’s capacity to depict the animating qualities and feelings which characterise her own subjective encounter with nature. She achieves these effects largely through her detailing of light, which is especially animated in her nocturnal scenes.
In Moonlight Mood (2018), a white moon hangs low in the centre of the painting, emitting a bright circular light that sits in contrast to the darker layers of paint which help to provide its form. Beginning with a white base, Leite produces the moon by leaving blank a stark section of this first coating of paint in the midst of an otherwise densely covered surface of deep blue and green, which divides the painting into earth and sky. The separation is further highlighted by an iridescent reflection of moonlight across the top-peripheral edge of the hills which make up the bottom half of the painting. The moon, round and prominent, therefore reveals to us an unworked section of the wood’s primary white coating which serves to remind one of the process involved in image production, as mediated by a feeling subject. Indeed Leite, who works from a collection of photographs which she calls her “sketchbook,” describes her work as representative of landscape sensations rather than landscapes themselves. It is precisely her imaginative engagement with multiple sources in her sketchbook: images of skies and landscapes she has seen in films, taken on holiday, or studied in both Brazilian and European art histories and their intermingling with more personal sources of feeling and memory, which gives her work an animated quality that exceeds plain visual representation. Moonlight Mood is from a series of work inspired by Leite’s travels through Europe, with a particular interest in depictions of light. —Elsa Gray
*born 1955 in Belo Horizonte | Living and working in Belo Horizonte, Brasil
220 x 160 x 5 cm
Patrícia Leite’s strong use of lines and contours condenses landscapes into minimal, yet strikingly evocative forms. Resulting in a style which draws variously on both abstract and figurative modes of painting, her work deals with the relation between memory and image-production, and the role of affect in manipulating our visual recollections of time and place. Often, finer textural details are exchanged for smooth planes of block colour, producing what appear to be idyllic yet ambiguous imaginings of pasture and firmament. This ambiguity of location, however, is offset by her work’s acute sensibility to atmosphere; the vividness of her paintings stems less from their being true to life in a representational sense, than from Leite’s capacity to depict the animating qualities and feelings which characterise her own subjective encounter with nature. She achieves these effects largely through her detailing of light, which is especially animated in her nocturnal scenes.
In Moonlight Mood (2018), a white moon hangs low in the centre of the painting, emitting a bright circular light that sits in contrast to the darker layers of paint which help to provide its form. Beginning with a white base, Leite produces the moon by leaving blank a stark section of this first coating of paint in the midst of an otherwise densely covered surface of deep blue and green, which divides the painting into earth and sky. The separation is further highlighted by an iridescent reflection of moonlight across the top-peripheral edge of the hills which make up the bottom half of the painting. The moon, round and prominent, therefore reveals to us an unworked section of the wood’s primary white coating which serves to remind one of the process involved in image production, as mediated by a feeling subject. Indeed Leite, who works from a collection of photographs which she calls her “sketchbook,” describes her work as representative of landscape sensations rather than landscapes themselves. It is precisely her imaginative engagement with multiple sources in her sketchbook: images of skies and landscapes she has seen in films, taken on holiday, or studied in both Brazilian and European art histories and their intermingling with more personal sources of feeling and memory, which gives her work an animated quality that exceeds plain visual representation. Moonlight Mood is from a series of work inspired by Leite’s travels through Europe, with a particular interest in depictions of light. —Elsa Gray
*born 1955 in Belo Horizonte | Living and working in Belo Horizonte, Brasil