ANA PRATA: Secret on the radio

No ideas but in things

petals radiant with transpiercing light  

contending  

above  

the leaves  

reaching up their modest green  

from the pot’s rim  

and there, wholly dark, the pot  

gay with rough moss

William Carlos Williams

Ana Prata’s painting operates between two conceptions of history—one cultural, made of a past populated by unavoidable references that always return; the other psychological, whose fantasy is to achieve simplicity through a sharpening of the senses, the product of a free, untrained hand less burdened by civilizational varnish. On one side, art history. On the other hand, art without history. This is nothing new but rather one of modern art’s key dilemmas: the impossible exercise of simultaneously absorbing everything and starting from scratch. Exorcising the past to reclaim some magic, fetish, or will-o’-the-wisp. Or reversing history’s arrow to assert that we are not the end of the line but the starting point—once again, the child.  

The examples are countless. While admiring children’s drawings, Picasso reinterpreted Velázquez’s Las meninas in over fifty versions, a single attempt to both kill and absorb the master. History is invoked but destabilized as authority. The succession of ruptures (a new tradition, as Ezra Pound or Octavio Paz might say), however, preserves the modern artist within a line of historical continuity. At best, the painter not only inserts themselves into a lineage but reorganizes an entire prior tradition.  

Here, though, there are no grand battles. Matisse’s ornamental surface, full of decorative arguments; the collapsed space of Cubism; the reconciliation of viewpoints; the flattened still life; or Picasso himself, quoted in a vast canvas nearly four meters wide—all are summoned to affirm painting as a field of affection, where one chooses their dance partner. Not irony, homage, or the fury of critique, but the quiet joy of one who knows how to play. In a small-format painting, a fierce bull emerges on the surface through a simple black silhouette, appearing almost like a harmless pet. From Lascaux to the bulls etched by Picasso and Goya, passing through Tarsila do Amaral’s version, Prata reduces the animal to its constituent parts, making painting an art of tauromachy. The play of forces expresses itself not through conflict but through graceful display, on the scale of an amulet.  

History, then, has a deflating role and serves mostly as a pretext. Modern vocabulary is as much a sign as an apple, vase, or bottle. Once the codes are recognized, what the work seeks is the tangibility of things. Prata’s pictorial surface is dynamic and luminous, with a solar intensity. The painter indulges in washes of light that ignite objects against the banality of the material world, whether through her high-contrast palette or the interplay of opaque and translucent areas. In some cases, there are pearlescent pigments that shift with the viewer’s perspective. The painting pulses and breathes like a living organism.  

Moreover, despite its graphic appeal, her strokes are fluid gestures, tending not to enclose figures in their own form. If art history sees in the line “the basic structure of the idea,” it is not projective reasoning we speak of here, quite the opposite. The artist’s line is wandering, retaining a trace of expressive intuition and attesting to the handmade, whether through brushwork or the fine dotted stitching of some fabrics that serve as her ground, already carrying their own pictorial assumptions. Their patterns and standardized shapes guide the eye dynamically across the surface, heightening chromatic contrasts and figure-ground relationships. Things lean on one another, but their balance is fragile (note the blue vase in Aurora or the succession of objects in À mesa). Sometimes they don’t even lean but float weightlessly, defying the state of matter (as in Luminosa), or merge and overlap, scrambling vision and reinforcing intentional disproportion (Bojo, Verso, Amigo Íntimo, among others).  

Yet despite this childlike irreverence that simplifies and schematizes forms according to its own laws, Prata implicates us in her objects, recognizing the figuration of things in their fragile, delicate legibility. Some of her fruits, though abstract, seem fresh, as if still prone to rot (Pliny the Elder told of birds trying to peck at Zeuxis’s painted fruits—but we needn’t go that far…). Part of this also stems from a certain obsession with the still-life genre, which fosters prolonged attention to objects and lends poetic and spiritual density to ordinary things. But here, again, there is no descriptive austerity. In the case of the smaller, more varied paintings, we are invited to abandon the sometimes swift, overwhelming visual experience of large-scale works for a more nuanced and measured vision. Acute sight replaces the “peripheral,” promising more active engagement. It is with these that we experience a “close encounter,” accompanied by the strange, seductive sensation that we are before whispered secrets. “The love of small things is a childlike emotion,” as Enrique Vila-Matas might say.  

In the mid-and large-sized works, the composition tends to structure itself around a central figure positioned on a rectangle, its edges adorned to create a framed effect. This procedure lends a portrait-like quality to a scene that initially belongs to the lexicon of still life, blurring genres and reinforcing a subjective dimension ascribed to these objects. None of this, however, leads us to emotional drama. Just as she handles history, Prata modulates her objects. Delicacies reveal themselves across a broad spectrum of techniques, and the contrast of different pictorial treatments makes the image resonate through oblique temporal rhythms, characteristic of a space traversed by the retina. Pencil marks, smooth or rough areas, scrapings, colors emerging from the ground, sticky oil on felt, etc. Unadorned, the painting refuses to conceal its own method—the way it becomes what it is, moving back and forth between constituting and deconstituting visible forms. In this exercise, something of the banality that encloses us is suspended, though not toward transcendence. Prata keeps us focused on what happens in the space between hand and eye, for there are “no ideas only but in things,” as the poet who signs this epigraph might say.  

Pollyana Quintella