Horizontal, 2013
Horizontal, 2013
photographic paper and aluminum
152 x 213 cm
With the graphic works Horizontal, Vertical, and Diagonal Cerqueira Leite produces largescale imprints of her body, which leaves literal traces on the canvas support [oriented horizontally, vertically, or diagonally according to her movements through space]. The pictures are both luscious fields of color, energetic in their implication of the body’s past intentional arc as it pressed, rolled, swiped, slapped, and otherwise marked the two dimensional plane of the image, and graphic renderings of bodily movement [like dance diagrams, but ones made after this action by registering its traces]. Clearly reminiscent of Yves Klein’s notorious Anthropometries of the early 1960s, where Klein, wearing a tuxedo, would publicly perform the act of directing or dragging naked women coated in “Yves Klein blue” paint across canvases mounted on the wall or laid on the floor, Cerqueira Leite’s pictures propose a totally different kind of relation between the female body and its indexical imprint. In this case the imprint of a clearly female body is, again, driven by the intentional arc—in particular, that of a model who is also an artist [female, Brazilian], highly aware of the connections between her embodied actions in the “now” and their artistic traces to be presented “later.” - Amelia Jones (Tracing the Body: Gesture and Materiality in the Work of Juliana Cerqueira Leite)