Yanna Soares at Beverley Knowles Fine Art

Yanna Soares at Beverley Knowles Fine Art

13 March, 2009
by: Katuschka

London Exhibitions

South America is the perfect cauldron for great art: a legacy of colour; a fiery, passionate spirit and a turbulent past give its modern imagery a furious tenacity with the visual energy of a small, sugar-filled child. Whilst the ragged walls and exposed pipework of the favelas provide street artists with an ideal canvas for their vividly disparate murals (for examples, look here and here) Brazilian fine art – or at least Yanna Soares – is dredging up the restless and persistent colonial past for inspiration. Her new exhibition at Beverley Knowles Fine Art sees the artist moving away from the purely graphic style of her earlier work into more dense and refined pieces, layered with the imagery of tradition and oppression; screen-printed, overlapping collages which suggest the idea of superimposed cultures.

Soares' pieces have an ambitious dialectic, no doubt inspired by the two lengthy trips she took to explore her home country, one involving a 5,000 km drive in a Land Rover (where do these artists get the time?). Her imagery features crops, tribal women, branded products, parrots, adobe houses, traditional prints and royalty. Screen printed onto fabric and haphazardly cast, some even with trade stamps on them, they look like the rough material stretched over cargo boxes or used for weaving.


Yanna Soares, Círio de Nazaré III, silkscreen on aluminium, 100x60cm

The most interesting pieces are those that juxtapose the various guises of the South American woman. Alo Alo Brasil (named after a style of Brazilian dance music) shows the imagined Brazilian woman (a Carmen Miranda fantasy), the slave woman and the white noblesse all tied to distinct rungs of the caste system (or to a racist stereotype) yet all lacking a certain identity. O Mulato reinforces this idea by showing a young native girl in restrictive European dress, a far cry from Soares' images of naked tribeswomen.

Sun-kissed and politically informed, Soares combines the fascinating and the questionable elements of her home country with a keen eye for aesthetics – she is, after all, selling these controversial ideas, cast with a Brazilian sensibility as commodities of that same history. However I feel that Soares' work does not delve deep enough into the darker side of the past: her images of a country disrupted and squeezed into a square European peg merely hint at the violence and latent resentment of the Creole mindset. Her images are at times too nostalgic and personal. Perhaps her patriotic love for modern Brazil has made her judgement softer.

But ultimately, Soares manages to articulate the same sense of Brazilian identity that Frantz Fanon espouses about Algiers; not so much an angry growl, but a plaintive cry for a country not allowed to grow into its own identity, and whose people are disenfranchised in a culture that is not entirely their own.

Yanna Soares is at Beverley Knowles Fine Art until 18th April 2009.

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