Patricia Leite: Paisagem de Lenda

Like many Brazilian children, Patricia Leite (b.1955, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) was raised on the legends of the Tupi-Guarani indigenous people. These stories are embedded in the landscapes of Brazil, where the gods reside in the sun, the moon, the forest, the sea, the stars and the mountains, transforming these features of the landscape into lead characters to which a young Leite would look to shape her own world and imagination.

For Paisagem de Lenda (Landscape of Legend), her second exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Leite presents a group of new paintings and a floor-based tapestry that invoke these indigenous stories, deeply linked to the landscape and ecology of Brazil. As these natural environments are being eroded by climate change, industry, extraction and the destructive policies of neglectful governments, Leite creates work that reflects on what will be lost, and in melancholic celebration of what still remains.

Central to the exhibition is the huge panoramic nightscape, Jaxi (2024), painted with oil on wood. Leite has an obsessive preoccupation with the moon, a subject she returns to over and over in an attempt to capture the strangeness and ephemerality of night, or the moment the day slips into night: the liminal feeling of the in-between. How to show the depth and immensity of the night sky? How to make a painting that feels like dusk? In Jaxi, we see the moon bright against an indigo night sky and we understand she is the painting’s protagonist, illuminating the edges of deep green palm leaves in the foreground, and casting other shapes into shadowy black silhouettes.

The Mumuru was created by a young girl Naiá’s adoration for the moon, the goddess Jaci. Some nights in the rainforest Jaxi appeared in all her splendour to light up the indigenous villages. When hiding behind the mountains, Jaxi would turn her favourite women of the village into stars in the sky. Naiá was known for her love of the moon, and she would dream of the day that she would be turned into a star, and shine next to Jaxi. Against her elders’ warnings, Naiá continued to dream about Jaxi, climbing the tallest trees and the highest mountains to beg the goddess to transform her into a star, her desire consuming her so much that she could no longer eat or drink. One clear night, an exhausted Naiá rested next to a lake, where suddenly she saw on the water’s surface the image of Jaxi, finally within her reach. Thinking that Jaxi had come down to bathe, Naiá dove deep into the water to meet her. Swimming deeper and deeper, she swam out of her depth and drowned. Jaxi, watching from above, was moved by such adoration and rewarded Naià’s sacrifice by transforming her into a star unlike any other that shines in the sky – one that would float on water. Naiá is memorialised to this day as the Mumuru, whose fragrant white flowers are said to only open at night for the goddess Jaxi, and blush pink at sunrise like the adoring face of the young girl Naiá.

Leite has described being interested in the place where figuration, abstraction and landscape meet, and in “creating a confusion” there, finding freedom in the space between these languages. Though in dialogue with the Brazilian modernist tendencies in which she was trained, she has created a personal synthesis that hovers in the space between abstraction and representation. The works can have a graphic tendency, but they are not flat. Instead, there is a close study of the materiality of painting: layers of paint and colour create a luminosity and a texture which capture a fleeting moment of change or a particular atmosphere. Building up layers on layers of thin oil paint, over-painting colours on untreated wooden surfaces, tuning and harmonising the colours over time, she creates a kind of liminality through this handling of paint which seems to hum or vibrate with the feeling of a moment.

For exhibition and sales enquiries please contact Clare Morris: claremorris@thomasdanegallery.com and Emma Da Costa: emma@thomasdanegallery.com

For press enquiries please contact Patrick Shier: patrick@thomasdanegallery.com