The Liberating Epic of Painting


        Landscape has been a central theme of Brazilian art ever since Dutch artists, led by Frans Post, documented and interpreted the fauna and flora of the Pernambuco floodplains. During the 19th century, artists from the French mission of 1816 faced the difficult task of capturing the exuberant tropical luminosity with a discreetly European color palette, tempered and replete with halftones. Even so, some quality pictorial records emphasize the presence of a Brazilian landscape that imposes itself on the retina and sensibilities of great artists. The first generation of modernists, especially Tarsila do Amaral, laid the foundations for a Brazilian color scheme, rural, rustic, and at the same time naive and sophisticated. Di Cavalcanti and Portinari accentuated the nationalist theme, defining forms and landscapes now incorporated into the common Brazilian repertoire. And so, the history of Brazilian art continues to this day, reflecting the human, social, and economic changes in the country.
        Fabiana Gabaskallás is included into this temporal current with large-scale paintings in which the epic defines concept and gesture. For the artist, painting is, above all, a bridge between times, an act of courage that embraces history and projects the future. She paints her desires and fears, but she also, and above all, paints a world we live in and the role of painting, a territory of gesture and matter, in a virtual and technological world. Gabaskallás emphasizes the importance of physicality, of the mysterious equation between time and space that unites painting, dance, and theater. Her professional practice as a doctor allows her to understand history and genetics; her paintings reflect the present based on the references and influences of her past. The painter is, and always will be, a link in the chain that permeates time and constructs history.
        Looking at these paintings, we encounter the vastness of images, beings, and things that tell forgotten stories and unheard-of beauties. They are old walking friends: Géricault and Delacroix, Monet, Parreiras, Kiefer, rafts, rough seas, rags, libertarian yearnings, obliterated ethnicities, tropicalisms, civilizations, cultures, revealed truths, allegories that confront established power. This is a world of colors and images that populate the artist's canvases. They are visual landmarks that appropriate the past to project a more just and harmonious future. Therefore, amid the terrors of today's world, in its deserts and its insanities, art reigns and resists in the forests, in the teachings obliterated by exclusion. Gabaskallás works in the silence of her studio, but her paintings are a collective outcry in favor of beauty and enchantment as instruments for valuing life and beings.


— Marcus de Lontra Costa
(São Paulo. February 2024)