Luiz Mauro

“Luiz Mauro-Between the Darkness and the Light”, by Divino Sobral, September 2014.

‘Art studio’ is the subject of the series of works that the artist Luiz Mauro has taken over the past three years. It refers to works that represent the places of production of works of art, usually isolated environments taken as private worlds where artists generate, conceive and execute their creations. The working procedure of Luiz Mauro implies research, archiving, and selection of photographs of art studios published in different medias of great diffusion, such as books, magazines and the internet. They are images whose authorships are not usually mentioned and that take part in the art circuit as tools of disclosure and of fetishization of artists, feeding public curiosity about the privacy of the art studios. Luiz Mauro selects documentary photographs of spaces that were tidy and experienced by the artists in their respective day-by-day routine: images that reveal every architectural particularity, such as mezzanine, windows, floors which lay down the position of furniture and perpetuate the place where each personal object is, and also some working tools and models arranged here and there, which register ongoing or accumulated works against the wall or casually exhibited in art studios – photographed without the presence of the artists or any other people.
In the process of choosing the photos, Luiz Mauro also uses the high contrast and the plastic manifestation of the light between black and white. The photo is the image fixed by the light. It is precisely the representation of light that matters to Luiz Mauro when performing the transposition of photographic images to another support, with other media and with a unique language, which goes between drawing and painting.
On the support, the artist applies disciplinarily several and successive layers of paints of a vast nature: first, the liquidity of Indian ink, which structures the drawing and defines the areas of light and shadow, after that, the density of the oil, which saturates the black and highlights the intention of the painter in the making of the work. That association creates delicate texture ranges and vast nuances of grey and black, which goes deeper in fulfilling the darkness. It seems that it is always night there, due to the gravity and the importance of the black color in those works, emphasizing even more the counterpoint of the light that arises in the midst of darkness – defining the space – that has come out from different sources: filtered through glass panes and windows, leaked by an open door or radiated from artificial sources that cannot be seen. Like the Indian ink and watercolor techniques, the clarity is obtained by the whiteness of the support gradually preserved in distinct areas of the work.
Although Luiz Mauro uses a second-generation image founded on the photo, the result of his process reveals in the end that it is not a photographic work. Everyone can see all the clashes with the media as well as the procedures employed for the constitution of the works. His aim is not to reproduce literally the photo. It is to use it as a matrix to the construction of a work that comes from the documentary record in order to hit the target of a poetic status full of melancholy and that displays itself its way of a changing creation between drawing and painting and its autonomous existence of being a photograph. Penetrating into darkness in search of light, Luiz Mauro internalizes and highlights the images of the art studios in searching for creative energy which manifests itself in these spaces where, solitarily, the artists create and/or remake the representations of the world.

(Translated by Rubens Santos)