Adrianne Gallinari’s Landscape revisits the historical genre of landscape from a fresh, linear and syncretic perspective. It is one of a number of pieces exploring large-format drawing as a medium of visual poetry in projects such as Wall Drawings (2000), in which Gallinari completely covered the walls of the Drawing Centre in New York with compositions made up of illegible scribbles and interlacing patterns of simple lines. Landscape uses that same language in an immersive panorama, somewhere midway between abstraction and figuration.

In this large work, Gallinari employs an economy of means, simple lines and a minimalist colour scheme. She creates a scene that is entirely criss-crossed by an insistent repeated line that evokes both the incisions of an engraving and some form of calligraphy that defies any attempt to read it. She has transformed the scribble into a continuous, almost geological pattern, reminiscent of a topological map. It is as if the plane were made up of layers of relief: plateaus, hollows, ridges and folds.

At the same time, she plays around with the perspective, setting the grids in different directions, as if each level of the terrain pertained to a different movement. This juxtaposition of lines creates a variety of different densities and produces a sense of visual vibration.

Within this meticulous weave, the abstraction is interrupted by recognisable suggestions from the natural world and minimalist geometric forms. In the centre, there is an area where the interlacing is darker and denser, somehow suggesting a blue-grey lake. Other ghostly shapes emerge from the void – basins and small, schematic trees – alongside prisms that somehow underscore the surreal, dreamlike nature of the landscape. They are like vestiges of figuration, barely perceptible enough to help us interpret the work. Gallinari’s artistic language paradoxically combines an obsession with order and seriality and a visually tangled composition. In Paisagem, she refines the surface; the brushstrokes are repeated, spreading out to the very edge to create a sense of overspill. The result is a strange landscape; we have to invest time and attention before we can start distinguishing the territory from an imaginary world that stretches out almost like a vision of the subconscious.

It draws on the use of automatic drawing as a way of recording the psyche, a technique favoured by surrealist artists and poets as a path towards a form of expression unmediated by the conscious. In Gallinari’s work, obsessive repetition of the same line seems to give tangible form to ruminative thought. The composition is based on a repetition that becomes increasingly complex and entangled. The ethereal figures lend the drawing a further sense of suspended, dreamlike, reality.

Hardly surprising, then that her work has been described by some critics as ‘mind maps’[1]. The psychological element is evident here and the drawing serves as a poetic representation of the artist’s imaginary world. There are clues in Gallinari’s own personal and educational history to the reasons behind this vocation for drawing as a means of expressing an inner world. After studying at the Escola Guignard in Belo Horizonte, she was awarded a Kuitca scholarship and spent time in Buenos Aires, where she later joined the local art scene. Gallinari is one of a generation of contemporary Brazilian artists who emerged in the 1980s. Her work reflects a Latin American sensibility that views nature not merely as a backdrop, but as the conceptual framework of artistic practice. She belongs to the more refined strand of the Brazilian graphic tradition, which follows in the footsteps of Alberto da Veiga Guignard, founder of the school where Gallinari studied. It is epitomised by the work of artists such as Amilcar de Castro (Gallinari’s teacher), who championed the expressive power of the pencil.[2]

Landscape is also a reflection on the discipline of drawing itself: a minimalist practice capable of shaping the world through texture and repetition. The landscape becomes a record of time and the record of a hand that draws, corrects itself, draws over what it has done and leaves the imprint of its process on the surface.

[1] Agnaldo Farias. Adrianne Gallinera. Desenho + pintura (Exhibition catalogue), Salvador de Bahía: Galería Roberto Alban, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

Clara Derrac

Adrianne Gallinari attended the Guignard School in Belo Horizonte. In 1997 she obtained the Guillermo Kuitca scholarship for young artists, which enabled her to move to Buenos Aires, where she won the Bridgestone Biennial Award at the Borges Cultural Centre in 2000. She currently lives in Sao Paolo.

She works mainly in painting and drawing, but also in video, ceramics and illustration to a lesser extent. Her pictures are characterised by the subtlety and economy of her brush-strokes. They are sketches that hint at human figures and natural forms, which she sets against fabulous, dreamlike landscapes in scenes that are disturbing in their simplicity, exuding a false naiveté that transports viewers to the no less disturbing territory of memories of children's stories. A case is point is Landscape (2007), a large-sized work built up from superimposed layers that weave a fantastic, unreal setting.

Gallineri's world shows itself to be all the more distressing in works such as those on the walls of the Drawing Centre in New York (2000).

Art critic Jenni Sorkin had this to say: 'Writing becomes drawing and drawing becomes a process of projection, conjecture, assumption and feeling. The heavy, hurried script – without breaks, punctuation, corrections or self-censorship – could be read as a cathartic diary, an ambivalent litany, a confession, or a mapping of loss tinged with desire'. Sketches that look like writing to the point where they become confused with manuscripts, inscriptions and microgrammes; words and traces that call for new forms of reading and interpretation.

Adrianne Gallinari's work has been shown at solo exhibitions at the Casa Triângulo in São Paulo (2001, 2003 & 2007), the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2001) and the Drawing Center in New York (2000). She has also taken part in collective exhibitions such as the Pontevedra Art Biennial (2000) and the Buenos Aires Contemporary Drawing Biennial (2001).

Beatriz Herráez