“… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, these Unmeasured Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” (Jorge Luis Borges, “On exactitude in science”)

 

Trying to imprison reality is an endeavor doomed to failure. Just like in Borges’ tale, Ana Elisa Egreja buries bedrooms, living rooms, facades, staircases, and windows, designing spaces with fruit and vegetables, animals, insects, birds, and other non-humans. Because it is all just fantastic reality, golden profane, gilded pop. Image and magic.

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1. It all started with the translucent, practical, durable, kitsch truth of Duralex plates, developed by a French glassmaking company in 1945 to replace traditional, expensive porcelainware. At the onset of mass consumption, such tableware soon came to symbolize the age of reproduction. The product’s name came from the Latin expression Dura lex, sed lex – “the law is harsh, but it is the law” –, and through time and usage, the utensils became the norm and the law, to the point that the brand no longer simply designated an object: it was the object itself.

Duralex places flooded Brazil in the 1960s, “crystallizing” households, cafés, bars, dives, schools, and offering their sturdy matte shimmer. Available in milky, blue and – above all – amber colors, made from sulfur, iron, and sodium, these tempered glass items also became all the rage and an icon around these parts.

And these utensils’ transparency and omnipresence in recent historical time serve as material for Ana Elisa Egreja’s painting in this exhibit. Drawing on emotional childhood memories, the artist turns glass (a mainstay of her work) into a double: both the support and that which allows itself to be seen through the support. She converts those into a sort of theater of reality. An allegory thereof.

 

2. It all started with Duralex plates in conversation with the placemats. Made popular by North Americans back in the late 19^th century, these suggested a playfulness in arranging seats at the table, and soon the little individual towels spread, incorporated into the domestic vocabulary as a form of protection of the solemn meal ritual, which, in turn, harks back to the power of the bourgeoise family. But they had greater aspirations: saving space, making everything more practical, and organizing people’s places during meals. As the Mutantes sang in Panis et Circenses: “these people in the living room are busy being born and dying.”

In Brazil, these little tablecloths, from the more elaborate to the evidently simply and cheaply made ones, populated homes in various social strata. Here, however, they make their way out of the dining room and onto the white walls; they occupy twenty spaces in the artist’s dislocated projection, and each of them carries the aura of the person who gifted them to Ana Elisa. Thus, meaning becomes autonomized, and the placemats serve as foundations for the canvases that play the Duralex’s role: they allow one to see the bottom of the plate when everything is simply the effect and the alchemy of painting.

 

3. It all started with the gold leaves that converse with art history itself here but are relocated to the urban, ethereal, colorful places created by the artist. The language of shades of gold – featured in a more or less condensed way here – was widely employed in Byzantine religious icons and mosaics, applied to the backgrounds of images to create a celestial atmosphere and signalize sacrality. But the use of gold leaf reached its peak in religious panel painting during the Early Middle Ages, particularly in Italy. Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto used to add gold to saints’ halos and the backgrounds of panels, and in doing so, they worked wonders and spread the illusion that divine light was entering the works and frescoes, and with it, the spiritual world itself.

Ana Elisa thus appropriates the golden shimmer to create a pop universe that produces a different kind of elevation: no longer the sacred settings, but the day-to-day of households that make the home into an altar of sorts. The erudite images from art history now serve the mundane universe: the enactment, the coming apart.

 

All is right just like two plus two equals five

 

In the Horizonte dourado (Golden horizon) exhibition, the elements described above are mixed into a big assemblage of distinct materials. Animals, fruit, tesserae, stained glass, pottery, panels from antiquity… are masterfully applied, combining histories, times, memories, and meanings. This is a cyclic time that covers its original tracks or marks of belonging.

There is plenty of irony in these assemblages, as if the artworks were exposing mass consumption, pop, and fakeness while also conversing with the arts system itself: the proportions, the color palette, the architecture, the quoting.

The stained glass and mosaic walls from antiquity prompt reflection on what indeed existed and what is simply an invention. The coxinha dumplings, so typically Brazilian and laid out on cheap white paper liners, contrast with an elegant velvet base and function like still lifes; pears harmonize with the Greek and Roman tesserae; the color of the woodpecker’s crest adorns and is adorned by the classic fabric in shades of red and gold.

Arranged on the imaginary Duralex plates are limes, tangerines, lobsters, radishes, tomatoes, eggs, potatoes, papayas, and okras that receive one last varnish so they can enact what they now are – pure artistic illusion. They are no longer nature morte in the sense of French academic tradition. They are more reminiscent of the still life, as in the addendum from the English school of painting, which still encountered life in these non-human objects set on tables and in households for observational delight and the demonstration of technique, art, and ingenuity.

But Ana Elisa Egreja’s primary reference may have been the Dutch 17^th century artists. The Dutch Golden Century is known for its detailed realism coupled with the representation of daily life, landscapes, still life, genre scenes, and portraits, with little to no emphasis on religious themes. Such was the new temple of Dutch merchant bourgeoisie, emancipated through commerce.

The mastery of domestic themes and indoor settings embodies other virtuosic forms of painting. No longer the sacralized places, but the territory of the home, the details of textiles, of clothing, the colors and adornments. Texture itself becomes an element, which, in turn, becomes representation.

In the artist’s hands, still lifes are humanized through the use of placemats, which introduce the irregularity of their fabric, the tastes and subjectivities of their former owners. They become art objects whose beauty is made from more commonplace and food-related tastes.

In the larger paintings in this exhibit, Ana Elisa also mobilizes and dislocates another traditional painting technique, the trompe-l’oeil – literally “deceive the eye.” Known as far back as Antiquity, the trompe l’oeil grew in prominence during the Baroque period and is appropriated by the artist, who plays with perspective tricks to create optical illusions whose beauty dismisses reality.

Originally arranged into murals, the trompe-l’oeil eventually gained utilitarian purposes. It now simulated windows, doors, and hallways to visually enlarge common areas in elite households. It took the place of something and, through classical Renaissance techniques, explored the very boundaries between image and veracity.

In revisiting this tradition, Ana Elisa creates spaces that are, and are not, imaginary. She visits the places she wishes to portray, photographs and probes them, but also invents and simulates them, and then explodes the Cartesian visual rhetoric that used to divide fiction and nonfiction.

The artist paints in 1:1 scale, an homage to “true greatness” (and one that harks back to our tale by Jorge Luis Borges), to have spectators enter the painting and be at the table or have the plate on their hands. Everything is life-sized in this supposedly realistic painting that makes even the most fantastic of scenes seem real.

After all, everything here is and isn’t authentic. The life-size window, which is at true scale but finds itself full of golden lion tamarins and stickers. The modernist house with colorful stained glass whose light dissipates on the walls. The Japanese panel that sits in the background so that the (quasi) tropical jaguars and blueberries may reign. The blue from the French royal house, applied to the tablecloth but covered by the pigeons that dwell in cities. There are also lots of references to Brazilian nature, with scarlet ibis and watermelons invading the canvases and turning the tropics into a visual convention of sorts. The artist also simulates gold, all over. She paints light and gives back golden tones.

But first and foremost, there is excess in the unique art of Ana Elisa: in the immense or diminutive scale, in the plates which are canvases, in the Duralex which is painting, in what takes place in the museum and which, here, happens on the wall of some living room, in the golden that infiltrates the entire exhibit and reminds us that even in medieval churches, “all that glitters is not gold.”

The only real thing that is left is a scholarly, refined conversation with painting: with the shapes, colors, light, perspective, proportion, space, density, ink, and horizontality. For in this exhibit, the tables and tablecloths are what demarcates the horizon line.

Such is the alchemy of Ana Elisa Egreja, the master of all magic that involves the act of imagining. A created staircase takes the place of the one the artist actually encountered; a painted window is superimposed onto the one that is really there; a still life leaves the artist’s table to project itself endlessly onto a painting featuring copper jars and straw baskets; a Duralex plate lasts only in the oval canvas that is a metonym for itself. Nothing is real in the painting. Art is what gives a perennial air to what was born to be ephemeral. Everything glitters just like gold, but it is all dust.