Marina Saleme: Ralo

Marina Saleme: Ralo [Drain]

Time is inherent to the transformations of the landscape, just as it is decisive of our experiences with the landscape-memories, belongings, recognitions, and expectations. Much of what Western thought has historically and structurally organized and sustained regarding the relationships between time and landscape (and their equivalence and, consequently, our spatial perceptions) is currently undergoing processes of deconstruction and expansion.¹ This process generates countless other narratives and impacts on the ways in which we exist and inhabit the planet. While only some of us are concerned (since one must also consider denialist positions that turn a blind eye) in the face of the political conjuncture, the technoscientific transformations of modes of survival, and the irreparable disturbances in the environment, the maintenance of life is collapsing. An era is ending, species are becoming extinct, and a brief chapter called humanity reaches its conclusion, as affirmed by unequivocal voices from diverse origins and fields of knowledge.

To conceive of the end as future, as something inevitable and thus already incorporated into the present, presents a challenge of language regarding the production and circulation of landscape images: what can still be constructed around something in degradation? At the core of this and many other questions, Marina Saleme has, throughout her artistic trajectory, been experimenting with distinct ways of seeing, digesting, and inventing landscape, as a kind of exchange of vibrations between subjectivity and exteriority-both understood here in their complexity, as phenomena that are at once interdependent and informed by their own dynamics.

With a forty-year trajectory in painting, the artist creates landscapes that dispense with the affirmation or validation of the real, without segregating notions or categories, whether realist, documentary, fictional, or poetic, of worlds and their images. Her painting is grounded within a field of experimentation that moves among multiple understandings of culture and nature,² while acknowledging that the latter is still defined through human relations with the environment in which they unfold. For a long time, the idea prevailed that nature constitutes the ontological foundation of human beings, a stable and immutable locus upon which the human drama, political, ethical, historical, takes place; Marina works with an awareness of this perspective, while also remaining attentive to the fact that nature is no longer understood merely as a passive, silent backdrop. In her works, these distinctions are charged with resonances.

It is not a matter of redundancies, coincidences between subject and nature, or the mere logic of their encounters; rather, one might consider that the paintings presented by the artist in the exhibition Ralo [Drain] seem to deliberately sustain a certain roughness, a strangeness between body (that of the one who paints and that of the one who sees) and landscape, understood as place or as a temporal framing of a place. This sensation arises either from the ways in which landscape can be perceived (as experiences proposed by the artist) or from the negotiations and poetic experimentations that are essential to the risk of thinking and painting something that does not necessarily find its analogue, as part of the procedure through which these works are created. These works offer our gaze of friction, conflict, resistance. This seems to occur through a procedure of insistence present in Marina's process, namely the attempt to translate visual expressions of what, as she puts it, "jumps to the eye" onto the canvas. This processual shift embraces chance, reworkings, and shifts in intention, in a kind of poetic mobilization in which gesture, time, and a sustained engagement with images converge. It is necessary to preserve the capacity for astonishment, as well as the willingness to question what painting gradually brings into view.

In the works presented in her eighth solo exhibition at Luisa Strina, Marina Saleme engages in the production of highly singular elements that, to take place within the pictorial space, paradoxically embody the visuality of traces, erasures, and absences, behaving as ambiguous and ambivalent presences. In Paisagem com ponte e quatro montanhas [Landscape with a bridge and four mountains], a red element and a white aura, a veil-like layer that accompanies it, cross the canvas; alongside it, a doubling, a mirroring, or perhaps a trace or a ghost, something that may have shifted its place, ceased to exist, and left behind indications of its presence. Through free, bodily, and expressive gestures that construct spaces with color, Marina achieves shifting compositions that transfigure themselves on the canvas: are they mountains or obstacles, bridges or ligatures, rivers or pathways, houses or punctuations of human existence, waterfalls or masses of color? The landscape accommodates these vicissitudes within temporalities that alternate and overlap, a fluid permanence alongside that which remains as the index of an event.

Thus, her works engage with time not as metaphor, but rather mobilize time as a structure of signification that is built with and within the landscape: reiterating, adding, composing, discerning, allowing things to escape, proposing that what is seen is an enigma of form and part of our experiences with the world. Nothing seems to be given or to structure itself simply. Marina paints what is situated in a kind of final stage, like a fragile thread tearing, dissolving, slowly fading away, in motion, even eluding the gaze. The artist works with a time that slips away and questions what substrate might still be possible for images to emerge. Marina constructs the image to let it escape, in terms of its "recognition" or its plurality of meanings, and perhaps to allow something of what was painted to transmute into something else. This sensation strongly permeates the atmosphere of Três [Three] and O rio [The river].

The title of the exhibition emerges from these considerations and proposes that time is also that which tells us that nothing will ever be as it once was. One might consider that Marina Saleme's works establish a dialogue with a verse by Manoel de Barros: "Time only moves forward." In Ralo [Drain], time operates through a dynamic without reversibility, without return, without retreat. There is no pause either. Everything drains, dissipates, flows. In her paintings, time is a tangle without beginning or end, casting textures upon things and, in doing so, connecting us to the active energies of their pictorial realities.

The vibrancy of Marina's chromatic palette is a fundamental aspect of this body of work. Blues, greens, blacks, and reds, each in their multiplicity, enter tension. There are almost no lines in these paintings; instead, masses of color persist, drawing near to one another, constructing space, inhabiting the landscapes, and forming areas of density. By operating through the construction of different densities of color masses, the artist seems to compress the horizon with the elements she presents on the canvas, as in O céu vai virar mar [The sky will turn to sea], where mountains inhabit the landscape and fill a large portion of the plane with blacks, establishing a zone of distinction between sky and water.

And color seems to emerge from deep within the work, arriving at the surface. The golds appear as instant within the landscapes, guiding the gaze, destabilizing and rebalancing the composition, generating contrasts. For Marina, painting with oil is to engage with a material that implies a temporality of waiting and observation, since something is always continuing to unfold even when the brush is at rest. "Color is both solution and tool. It is color that confers materiality to space," the artist explains. Color emerges through an ongoing engagement with the prepared canvas, which acquires an underlying ground that is gradually covered by brushstrokes of varying intensity, producing areas of opacity and transparency, fields of transition and gradients. The gesture of constructing color remains visible, it stays on the canvas. And through this exercise, color defines itself.

Marina's landscapes defy the logic of inventory; they do not need to render visible what lies beyond the canvas, but instead inaugurate an unstable, shifting, and questionable image. In this sense, the poem Tortures, by Wisława Szymborska, offers a resonant echo: "Nothing has changed. / Except for the course of boundaries, / the line of forests, coasts, deserts, and glaciers. / Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, / disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, / alien to itself, elusive, / at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, / while the body is and is and is / and has no place of its own."

— Galciani Neves
April 2026

Translated from Portuguese by Guilherme Ziggy