A TRAMPOLINE TALE

With Maíra Senise

On view at Ed. Varié, 184 E. 7th Street, West Storefront, New York, from August 12 to September 5 2021

A Trampoline Tale, Maíra Senise´s first solo show at Ed Varie, presents a selection of the artist´s recent works, merging reminiscences of childhood and a humorous observation of the art world.

Standing at the crossroads of abstraction and the figurative, Maira Senise´s raw body of work follows a playful set of protocols in which she uses the matter to reveal the forms of hybrid objects and creatures, whether using brushstrokes and empty space of the canvas, or her fingers that she applies to shape ceramics, leaving room to chance and the unknown to appear.

The absence of hierarchy between objects and artworks in Senise´s artistic practice is highlighted in A Trampoline Tale by the recurring presence of the podium. By playing with matter and color, as well as with the notions of high and low culture, the artist demystifies the art material´s aura and the artwork´s status, suggesting in the background a spirited criticism to a mostly male dominated pompous art system, reflecting the overall structure of our society.

Conveying this unpretentious approach, a voluptuous yet precarious organic shaped wooden sculpture reveals through ovoid holes some excerpts of experimental videos where human artifacts and images of nature merge and interact one with another, blurring the line between their essential characteristics. In this enchanted playground, objects become universes and borrow human features, creating a kind of homey world of their own. Small drawings and ceramic objects are displayed in the foreground, synthetizing the artist’s universe, as further developed in the gallery space.

Using a pictorial language between childlike and primitive, the artist´s witty and uncanny yet familiar body of work recalls the innocence, joy and recklessness of one’s childhood, in a joyous full mix that reveals an accumulative nature, as kids collect shells and stones, conferring on to them the magical properties of talismans.

As the transitional quality of Senise´s objects and artworks address the child that is in each of us, the artist expresses with universal symbols the sensation of joy and fear, tension and exhilaration that we experience in a competitive environment, be it at school, in the workplace or in society at large, reminding us that life is a playground made of experimentation, failures and successes.