THE Roman Catholicism of Beatriz Milhazes, spelled out in her earlier work, becomes a subtler presence as her career develops.
In Casa de Maria (1992), a tiny, simplified Madonna, with an opaque gold halo, is positioned as the crest of a gold tracery shield. The shield shape is surrounded by ghostly grey and white floral motifs suggesting lace and flower garlands. Reflecting on the influence of her home city, Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes says: “All the elaborate and detailed architecture and the devotion to gold and celebration . . . have always fascinated me. For my work, the Baroque became important in the early 1990s, Hispanic culture in general from art to architecture, especially the Catholic church, and women’s royal costumes.”
The small portrait of the Virgin Mary is the Virgin of Guadalupe, from Mexico. In the early 1990s, the artist was engaged more with Spanish culture than with Portuguese. “I was interested in representations of the Virgin Mary, especially figuratively. I have very few paintings where you can see the image. That phase did not really last because I am not a figurative artist. I just keep the feeling and the atmosphere and how that would interfere with my abstract art, because abstract art is a lot about spirituality.”
Photos of works in “Maresias”, meaning Atlantic breeze, cannot do them justice, as the layered, almost hypnotic, large canvases become animated at different distances and with the light playing at various angles.
The artist’s monotransfer technique, developed in 1989, still underpins her practice today. She paints motifs on to plastic sheets, which are transferred to canvas, and the transfers repeat the forms through layering. Moving the plastic sheets changes the materiality and texture of the paint, while layering the memory of the process. Montransfer adapts the concept of collage to painting, while retaining a deliberately painterly quality.
Circular shapes dominate the show’s second room, making reference to rosary beads, crochet, lace, arabesques, Portuguese colonial culture, Catholicism, and carnival forms. “Carnival in Brazil is a very serious thing, it’s a kind of religion.” In Coisa Linda I, Something Beautiful I (2001), overlapping circles of concentric dots in gold, silver, bronze, and red evoke the feeling of a church interior, with the play and refraction of light creating an immersive experience.
The turn of the millennium marked a turning point in the artist’s career. After her first major solo exhibition in Brazil in 2002, Milhazes represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale a year later. The expanded scale of her paintings anticipated her mid-decade public art. In 2005, the segmental brick arches of Gloucester Road Underground platforms were echoed by the solid, intensely coloured circles and Pop Art protean forms of Peace and Love.
TBA2/Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection. Photo Fausto Fleury. © Beatriz Milhazes StudioBeatriz Milhazes, Maresias (2002-03)
A year earlier, Milhazes had created a seven-storey-high glass façade for Selfridges Manchester, presenting a joyous cosmic swirl of spheres and shapes from the natural world, in ice cream colours. For her exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate, in 2023, the artist represented the phases of the day, from sunrise to sunset, in five vertical panels, with a starry night at the centre, on the gallery’s sea window, in a temporary vinyl installation O Esplendor. But she would not relate these experiments in colour and glazing directly with religious stained glass. “Stained glass started this project I did at Selfridges. It is interesting how things work out. I like glass, but never really thought about it in churches. I was more interested in the volume and the movement of the gold, and the sculptural qualities, but not exactly the stained glass.”
From 2008, the natural world, including Copacabana, the Tijuca rainforest, and Rio’s botanical gardens, became a strong influence. In Banho de Rio (River Bath) (2017), petal shapes of varying size, filled with linear and curving patterns and intense acrylic pinks, purples, and gold, overlap to suggest rippling water. Abstracted floral shapes, clustering where the larger shapes’ outlines meet, suggest lily pads. A subtle background pattern of graduated horizontal gold strips, becoming fainter towards the top of the plane, creates a sense of motion. Light means that rivers can be any colour, the artist says. “There’s also something magical about rivers because they support life.”
Although this artist’s work sometimes references the ornamental face-painting of the animist Kadiweu tribe, and she describes the ever present circles as the “core of spirituality”, she is also a sincere Catholic. “I have a lot of faith. I believe in God. I don’t have a routine of going to mass or confession, but I do like the Catholic rituals. I go to mass, but it depends on how I feel.”
She also feels a connection to Sister Irma Dulce, canonised in 2019, the first Brazilian female saint. “SUS [Brazilian health service] incorporated her project as part of the government’s. I support her through visits. I support through communications. I support in different ways.”
“Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias” is at Tate St Ives, Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall, until 29 September. Phone 0173 679 6226. www.tate.org.uk