ECILA HUSTE, born and resident in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, has been painting since 1981. Her art education comes from School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, Museum of Modern Art and Center for Contemporary Art, in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
Her work has been shown in many group and solo exhibitions in Brasil and abroad. Among them, main solo exhibitions were at Centro Cultural Correios (RJ-2018), Casa de Cultura Lauro Alvim (RJ-2003), National Museum of Fine Arts (RJ-1997), Centro Cultural Candido Mendes (RJ-1994), Centro Cultural CEMIG (MG-1994), Universidade Federal de Viçosa (MG-1994), Museu do Telefone (RJ-1993), Palácio Barriga Verde (SC-1993), Sala Miguel Bakun (PR-1992), Espaço Cultural Petrobras (RJ-1985).
About her work:
I started painting with gouache, then with watercolour, later with acrylic medium, which I have been exploring until today. Big canvas have always fascinated me, so my work started growing in size constantly until the day I painted a canvas measuring ten meters long for one meter sixty wide for an exhibition in 1996, in Rio de Janeiro. It was a wonderful experience!
I work with my canvas on the floor, one colour at a time, in a sequence of quick gestures and with a big corporeal movement, walking around the canvas and having always an upper view . As in a web, the colours interweave all throughout the extension of the canvas. There are moments in my working process when I have the sensation that the brush, the canvas, the medium I use, myself and the space which sorrounds us are just one thing.
The final work is almost always profuse in colour, has a continuous motion, making it difficult for the eye to know where the colour starts or ends.
ECILA HUSTE
Centro Cultural Correios, Rio de Janeiro, Setembro 2018
INTERDEPENDENCE
Nothing is separate from anything
If you want to get to the idea of interdependence quickly, I invite you to look at your own body. In it, all organs – regardless of size or function – are equally important and indispensable for your body to function. That is, our organs alone are nothing but united they act in a very intelligent and sensitive way. Nothing is separated in this wonderful system.
As we recognize this reality, we can come to the conclusion that everything around us works the same way. We are a system inserted and acting within other systems known to us, such as the familiar, social, professional and the universe we live in as well.
We are all connected with the ancestral family energy that we receive through our parents, with the energy of the universe, which welcomes us here on the planet, and with the energy of each person that passes our way. We are a part of this universal whole and, as part of it, we are also the whole. All the people and circumstances that present themselves in our way are interconnected through a link almost always invisible or imperceptible to our eyes.
Therefore, we need to be attentive to our attitudes towards everything that surrounds us, because they always bring consequences, good or not. And because we are interconnected, we are co-responsible for all the situations that occur throughout our lives.
Interdependence must be observed and felt. Alone we are nothing. Just look at the nature around us. There is room for all colors, shapes and species that live together and maintain their individuality.
Before reaching the sublime moment of creation, in any area of activity, we depend on a large number of people who have collaborated. To all of them, gratitude!
E C I L A H U S T E
September 2018
INTERDEPENDENCE
From a strictly visual point of view, the painting of Ecila Huste seduces because it brings back that reflection in which Renoir affirmed not to believe in the colours, but in the relation between them.
The most involving, however, is that the Painter here appropriates this thought in a perverse way, against the dogmas of chromatism, extracting from this systematic transgression the greater trump of her palette.
In an antithesis to the well-behaved dialogue between principal and complementary, the colours, in this set of works, pursue fracture and estrangement.
They reach a threshold where the Impressionist Master’s sentence becomes valid – dialectically – on the contrary: no longer the harmonious confabulation between colours but their antagonism and sometimes their clash.
It is not the structuring tonal recombination and symbiosis of painting as language, but trances and traumas capable of imploding this discourse in a harvest of much denser and unpredictable meanings.
This, as initially said, concerns only the visual part of these moments in Ecila’s art. All the mobilization of trait and colour is seductive, but even more so is the coherence with which the whole semiological contents of the visible part of her work turns into an exact fantasy.
It is, therefore, quite surprising that the Painter herself, in one of her texts, denies that there is any calculation or programming of effects in her process. Everything there flows, according to her, in the creative impulse dictated by a rhythm in which playfullness exercises itself in its shades.
This, of course, is consistent with the dictates of Gesture Painting itself. But in rare other moments of it – and I’m not just talking about Brazil – there is such a perfection of counterpoint that the various treatments are challenged and solved, in this web of transparencies and dissonances, which are more envolving, according to the artist herself, when they are oblivious to the rigors of calculus.
What reminds us of the boy Mozart that, according to his biographers, answers to an astonished court musician about the secret of his impossible harmonies: It’s very simple, I put together the notes that love themselves.
Ruy Sampaio
International Association of Art Critics