Painter Viviane Teixeira has titled her upcoming exhibition Among Feathers and Plumes, the Eye of God.

These dense paintings seem to want to tear themselves away from the canvas, just like the beings depicted—birds with their
claws, uprooted trees, both ascending to the sky, or at least proving they are capable of this feat.

Everything is painting. Everything reveals an unknown aesthetic solution. All of this, in Viviane's work, is the result of countless brushstrokes, some accumulated and others sparse, which transform into feathers and bird wings, and sometimes, flower petals.

The result is not just creative spontaneity or the vision of naive art. They are archetypal visions that bring meaning to our current contemporary moment.

In 1972, a group of international artists called themselves Outsiders in Art, and included Paul Klee, an artist from the 1940s, in this denomination.

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Brazilian culture has always been characterized by its constant contact with expressions considered "primitive," naive, or popular. This need to search for one's own origins is once again a pressing issue in our global world. And it has influenced our artists, including Indigenous peoples and those of African descent.

Our greatest and most enduring cultural influence has still been the recognition of Western culture. In it, artists like Picasso were influenced by African art. He, not as an ethnologist, but through a certain aesthetic comparison of the identities between masks and sculptures from Africa and Oceania, which he applied to his own work.

Just as Klee, in his graphic work, sought archetypes of Eastern origin in the primitive graphic art of the East. Rather than being a collection of technical and stylistic rules, it is the result of an introspective analysis in which he engaged throughout his work.

It was Freud's psychoanalysis, in the early 20th century, that brought the knowledge of the existence of an individual unconscious that gave rise to this search in the arts.

I also found some parallels in Naïve art with Viviane's paintings. Colors intended to evoke feelings more than describe nature. This is accentuated in the titles of the works "How Beautiful My Love Is" and "The Hummingbird That Brought My Love." I would say that the fundamental theme in Viviane’s painting — her Leitmotif—is the uncertainty of existence. By superimposing a painted canvas on an empty frame of a much larger scale, the meaning of freedom is accentuated. The experiment with reality occurs in the course of the work, when reality itself is acquired while searching for aesthetic values.

This is not academic figuration, but rather its exact opposite. In the artist, this is the result of a long and rigorous practice of work that emerges from the openness she has allowed herself to achieve.

The artist reiterates a certain romantic feeling and also attempts, through words, to express a feeling of love and love for others. As if she abandoned the more immediate world around her and built a bridge to this other world. After this, the images created become unstable and cross a bridge between nature and spirit.

The accumulation of pictorial matter sometimes purposefully ignores the brushstroke, creating an expressionist density. There is an inherent anxiety in each painting, a quasi-drama in which mangrove-like roots appear uprooted and resemble the feet of birds floating in the air.

In this apparent pictorial spontaneity lies a total responsibility. And Viviane Teixeira goes from spontaneity to the rigor of the idea, and from the idea to the paint – the material.