Patricia Leite (ONLINE EXHIBITION): Caninana

As a site of outstanding natural beauty, the Barra do Una is also subject to profound environmental damage. For Caninana, Leite distils the Barra do Una’s biodiversity to its essence, making visible otherwise overlooked details, and celebrating the region’s fragile complexity. Leite gives an outlet to her memories and latent affections through an extremely particular visual exercise. Photographs capturing bucolic scenes from trips or images extracted from videos that catch her attention trigger a process towards painting.

Working with her long-standing fascination with light, what may initially be interpreted as a leaf, a horizon or the moon quickly falls away to become an observation of where the ephemeral and the permanent meet. Using striking colour contrast such as tropical forest green with night sky blue, as well as abstraction, Leite chooses her building blocks to portray the world in different levels of intensity. Behind her choices lies her desire to capture a moment, drawing from experiences such as basking in the sun in Minas Gerais, watching a carnival parade, or contemplating nightfall on the beach.