All artistic production of this period was generated with a thematic called “Tramas” (textures, weft..). Its meaning is engrafted in our hearts by the quotidian that sometimes passes without being noticed.
The velocity of our lives makes us ignore some details. Although the absence of these interlacements could disturb (our natural flow) or even make some constructions impossible, be it natural or produced by man.
These wefts can simplify urban constructions, like cities, as well as provoke the shadows like the weft of branches, build “ocas” (Brazilian indigenous homes), or the habitat to birds as nests and other series of motives that this thematic supports for its own existence.
The birth of this series arose in order to value this flow that comes along with peoples lives.
Patrícia Mado
Who has been in the 1975 Biennial will not have forgotten the Room “Xingu Land” that occupied a great area in the third floor of the pavilion. There, photographic panels that replicated aspects of the region could be seen. One of them discloses the structure of a house of the Kaimura village, in the Alto Xingu, that Patricia Mado presents to us, surprisingly, through a pattern of wefts that connects us with the structure of the oca. And she does more, she allows us to occupy this space. The engraved wefts of Patricia are an exercise of recreation of the organic wefts of life, in the eternal cycle of passage of man on Earth.
As well as the veins and the capillaries that cross our inner body, or as the grass interlaced by birds in the nests, or even, as the branches of trees with no leaves, Patricia explores the result of these structures in her xylographs weaving her weft. The wood itself that is the origin, contributes for the expressive game of intersections in the innumerous breadths that ridge the surface, and that, to be turned black, will need the gouge of the artist to deepen the background that will be unmasked as white. Patricia controls the technique as a weaver controls the sewing press. She is capable of seeing the bare structure with no obstacles to her eyes and this way she gives us the revelation of her self.
In some cases, the wefts become evident in the street crossings, as if they were seen from outer space, where the details are hidden and the structure remains. Patricia persues what is inside and gets out of herself the weft that utters, exposes and expresses with intensive graphic strength, on the aggressive contrasts of xilograph.
The wefts of Patricia Mado hold the authenticity of the Kamaiuras, the freedom of the birds, the renovation of trees and the circulation of life in our body.
Angela Ancora da Luz
Director of the “Escola de Belas Artes - UFRJ”
Historian and Art Reviewer
“The engravings of Patricia Mado explore a graphically very rich subject: Wefts, revealed in several images. Nests, twigs, roof structures, aboriginal ocas, maps... all done in xylographs of great dimensions, exploring interlaced graphisms with heavier or lighter gesture spontaneity. The represented objects, so distinct, sometimes natural, sometimes elaborated by the man, converge by the graphic aspects in them, by the black lines on the deep white or whites on the deep black taking advantage of the strong contrasts that xylography permits.”
Marcos Varela
Plastic Artist and Head of Department at the “Escola de Belas Artes da UFRJ” – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
Patrícia Mado
