sperbg

In the work E.A.P. 2018, Gisele Sperb, from a dense and mixed painting, invites us to visit an unknown and foggy place, in which a cat seems to float among the smoke. In this work, unlike her later works, Sperb seems to contain her marked and expressive brushstroke, or perhaps hide it in the overlapping layers, where her most visceral instincts rest. The smoke or mist that supports the cat refers to the artist's own experience and how she has been building her story. Bearer of a disease that steals her energy and "inebriates" her eyes, duplicating and blurring the images, she perceives everything that surrounds her as an abstract painting. During the creative process, she had to constantly negotiate with these nuances of fatigue, which was completely embedded in her pictorial production. If at times she was taken by a speed in the impression of her gestures, as if imprisoned in the present time, when her energy was stolen, tiredness revealed another moment of her work, with overlapping layers, which color slowly reaches different nuances of intensity. According to the artist's own words “the vigorous marks denounced an acceleration that referred, once again, to the present time.”
The interpretation of the work "the black cat", by Edgar Allan Poe (E.A.P.) is sublime, deeply captures the dark essence of the tale, in which the narrator recounts the atrocities committed against a cat who devotes its love to the torturer. In a fleeting anger he kills the cat, who “visits” the narrator during the suffering when he sees his house on fire. Thus, like the narrator, Gisele gives voice to her own impulses.
At the same time that she visits literature, she searches for a safe place to express her feelings, the “nest”, the return home, when in childhood, serenely, she read a book under the peach tree. In the composition observed here, with a painting sometimes lowered, ocher, red, burnt Sienna and browns appear, tones that refer to the color of the soil of her native land. Earthy colors like the ground that that girl rested when she immersed herself in the works of Jules Verne in search of her vivid dreams to find the mysteries of the journey to the center of the Earth. Fantasy literature has always populated the artist's dreams and childhood and appears poetically alive in the artistic work of this girl / woman.
In the work E.A.P. 2018, “the black cat invites us” to participate in the space created in the work. As highlighted by Israel Pedrosa about abstract expressionism, color gains a new characteristic and seems to be part of the space, making the observer become part of the work. Fire red and black are used boldly, she applies the layers without fear, projecting her emotions slowly, but still intensely, on the screen.
The analyzed work allows a range of interpretations. When the spectator rests his gaze and soon returns, he is able to swim over the ocean of new meanings. Now the cat rests vigorously on the dead woman's blood, waiting only for the sublime moment to reveal itself. Getting closer and allowing the painting to penetrate, you almost "hear the cat's grunt" stuck on the basement wall.
It is impossible not to notice times coexisting. With the gaze imprisoned, the viewer can experience the feelings of two individuals united in the layers of paint, the narrator and the artist. For those who know her artistic trajectory, Sperb exposes a dark side through the tale, which until now has not been seen in her works. In the process, from the anxiety of life to "suspend time", the work emerges. About this, it is only worth mentioning the words of the narrator of the story “[…] to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul”, in this work.

Geza Guedes
Master in History from the Federal University of Pelotas
Historian responsible for the APLUB Documentary Collection
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The artist, like the human being, challenges life in every creative gesture. It is in creation, in the transmutation of images, that art is revealed. Art that euphemizes the most fearful human facets, such as time and death. Art that cannot be characterized as heretical action, but rather the purest task of the imagination.
Gisele Sperb, throughout her artistic career, presents an unusual perception of time. When we speak of time, in Sperb, we do not speak of thematic, but of brand, imprint and line. The artist's repertoire, sensitive to temporality, seems to extrapolate the very intimations of her experiences, finding a margin in the ancestry of the human species, a fact expressed in the precious symbolic treatment, present in each of her works. Conceptual flexibility, both in theory and in the artist's production, demonstrates the desire to establish meanings, in a conscious escape from reductive judgments. However, we recognize in Sperb the influences that mark her being an artist, as well as all the philosophical symbolism of consecrated authors listed by her, as well as her identification with relevant names from the world of Arts, such as Paul Cézanne, Willem De Kooning and Iberê Camargo.
Regarding the work in question, called Suspension 2017, it seems the exact moment of the artist's faithful cut on the canvas. With a quick stroke, it makes time bleed. But, what time is bleeding? It is Chronos who collapses. In Greek mythology, Chronos is considered the lord of time, which dominates and subdues everyone; with its relentless ephemerality, it devours its own children. However, the artist's trait makes Kairós, the youngest son of Zeus, reign over, representing everything that escapes chronological finitude, given his agility. In the death of Chronos, time is suspended. Heroic act that demands not only the speed of Kairós, but also the precision of Sperb's brushstroke.
For convergence, it is important to highlight that in the production phase of Suspension 2017, Gisele Sperb shows concern with the speed of her features. In her book, Epiphany in the creative process: when the time is other, she says: “(...) I expressed a speed that started to cause me some discomfort. The vigorous marks denounced an acceleration that referred, once again, to the present time. ” (SPERB, 2020, p. 51). However, the great battles, even symbolic, are fought in the present. And in the fight between the artist and time, Kairós wins, stamping from red to blue. Different polarities, placed in harmonic collision.
Sperb's discomfort was necessary in order to break the barriers imposed by diminishing contemporaries, by social expectations, by the negligent acts of a hurried, fleeting life. This is the moment when the artist ignores the beacons of time and space, in transcendence, and finds her place in art, suspended.

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Alexandre da Silva Borges
PhD student and Master in Education (UFPel)
Historian (FURG / UAlg-Portugal)

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In the figurative works of Gisele Sperb, the question of time is packed by careful observation of the speed and fluidity of the moments experienced by the contemporary subject. The artist reflected in a selfie in the mirror reveals her and ourselves. In the installation where a cell phone is located inside an ice cube, Self-portrait - Installation, 2016, we are faced with anguish and discomfort when seeing such a “necessary” and “essential” object trapped, chained by time, time that melts slowly, time that we don't have nowadays.

In the series of photographs Experience - 2017, fragmentation causes a strangeness, perhaps she wants the observer to dedicate a little more time to enjoyment by not making the object photographed obvious.

The artist resumes time. Her energetic brushstrokes, laden with expressions, accumulate and blend to achieve abstraction. And, it is in this continuous process that I observe the fog that hangs in the frame of Gisele Sperb, Untitled -2017, a fog that overflows beyond the four vertices. That same frightening and enigmatic shadow (?) That I see in the Legend of the Headless Horseman by Washington Irving. Lost in the forest, on the battlefield of Louchbuie, the Knight lives between the past and the present that fuse in the suspension of time.

In the 2018 paintings, the artist takes on her expressive brushstrokes superimposed on the traces of figures and spaces that have blended into abstraction.

Gisele's works make us reflect on how we experience or experience our daily life, how we get lost in our own time, in this locomotive that drags us to the next day.

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Luana Bandeira

Visual artist

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Gisele Sperb is a multi-media artist who moves through traditional painting, photography, videos and installations. With great mastery and cadence she knows how to balance the academic knowledge of techniques with contemporary needs of expression, breaking the boundaries of art! Congratulations on this production!

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Prof. Dr. Wagner Lacerda de Oliveira

School of Fine Arts - Federal University of Bahia

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Gisele Sperb seems to live in constant combat on her canvases, the intensity of the brushstrokes reveals the limit of her struggle, it is not only about sharing memories, but also her experiences, attentive to a time that, she says, is other one during the process creative.
In the J 2015 portrait, an invoice that is sometimes watery, like time running, duels and lets itself be overcome by the brushstrokes marked in shades of blue and orange, referring to eternity and at dawn.
In the painting Nyama 2018, red stands out on the canvas amid other colors, with brushstrokes that refer to expressionism. During this period, the artist deepened her research on the symbolism of color, using authors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In the installation, in which a smartphone is trapped in an ice cube, the artist provokes the observer to reflect on her own experiences in the face of contemporary technologies.
In the last abstract paintings, blues and oranges mix as if ratifying time, other, past, present and future exist at the same time. It is possible to find figures in the midst of abstraction, figures that mix in spaces.
Sperb's work is a portal for attentive and reflective looks; a file that keeps records of their actions, which address issues of existence, memory, absence; of life and death relationships.
The artist invites the viewer to know her world and be part of it, through a careful research that is evident through her production.

Bea Barbosa
Psychologist and Visual Artist

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The artistic production of Gisele Sperb, who undresses and puts herself under the magnifying glass of an audience with whom she wishes to establish contact, offers us with her diverse works, using various techniques in well-elaborated proposals where she demonstrates her developed and improved ability. The artist perceives the property and the refined technique, based on her creativity.

Her artistic production exposed in the series “Self-portraits”, Portraits, Experience 2017, Photography 2017, Waters of March 2019, Waiting 2016, Abstracts 2017, Abstracts 2018, Abstracts 2019, 2020, Process Studies and Other Languages, where we can perceive, her paints and pure colors, tubes coming out of the canvas, with quick brushstrokes and in different directions, often do not escape the definition of form, where its academic and talented trait is perceived.

In the series Other languages ​​in the work “Epiphany” of 2015, we can glimpse an artist leaning towards a starry sky, perhaps reminiscent of the past, with the theme of the universe, its dark immensity and its small points of light, small stars in a possible reference to her father, the star counter. This work erupts from her backyard of memories and comes to light in a flash, gaining a new context and approach.

Her paintings use vivid and contrasting colors, with overlapping, abstraction and dematerialization of objects, their lines and small deformations that bring us the idea of ​​movement and dynamism, break borders and place us face to face with a red canvas, or a large cutout scale, from another canvas, extols current life with an emphasis on technology, new materials and new industrial devices.

Exploring the pictorial line as much as possible, the colors delimiting the different planes, bringing intensity and shaping the volumes applied to the simplicity of her light themes in life, reflect her restless nature and her attentive gaze. By simplifying the form, it is not imbued with critical intent, but just making us reflect on simple and meaningful things about living, joys and emotions of being, thus recreating everyday life.

The artist takes us to a reflection, taking us along the paths of the unconscious, exploring our imagination and our subjectivity, surprises us with a distortion of the real world transcending the known and breaking barriers, taking us to another way of perceiving her proposed themes. The man wrapped in daily habits that questions himself before the mirror and himself.

The flow of different languages ​​brings us the versatility of an artist who, when starting her first steps in the basement of her house in her early childhood, was already outlining the artistic vein, and sought to translate her observations about the world in a peculiar way. For her everything is subject to observation and this results in her works, reflections in the highest sky of starry nights and dives in basements that have been internalized throughout her life bring to light another work. According to herself "Every object is loaded with meaning. Every object is political".

Congratulations on your work!

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Norma Cavalcante

Plastic Artist and Interior Designer

School of Fine Arts - Federal University of Bahia

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