Garden of Earthly Delights
Beatriz Milhazes
Vivid and at times gaudy swathes of paint are stretched across the canvas like skin covering a skeleton; like most people’s skin, it meanders between a silky un-sunned perfection and a tiredness so tangible it seems to be on the verge of peeling off and floating away. Milhazes’ paintings may employ run of the mill psychedelia - kaleidoscopic waves of colour, flowers, love hearts, beads and swirls - yet look closely and her imagery has the brightness of a garden which has grown too quickly beneath a blazing sun and whose colours have begun to rot and fade. This evocation of abundant decay is an integral part of the paintings’ attraction - it’s difficult not to feel buoyed up by such exuberance in the face of obsolescence. Milhazes seems all too aware that every flow is followed by another ebb but it’s no cause for gloom. It’s a vivacity often hoped for yet rarely embraced.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes still lives in Brazil where she designs sets for her sister’s dance company. She grew up listening to Brazilian music which, along with dance, is as necessary to her as paint in the creation of her images - and it shows in her spirited partnering of pigment and canvas. (Milhazes has mentioned how samba has coloured the creation of her ‘wild carnival imagery’, and later this year is publishing an artist’s book of screenprints accompanied by the lyrics of a selection of 12 Brazilian songs.) Like music, her paintings engage with abstraction to great visceral and allusional effect, and, despite their look of trippy spontaneity, it is the spontaneity of a tightly choreographed performance; there is method in her Technicolor madness. Spores of colour pulsate with seeming abandon across the surface of Meu Miudo (My Tiny One, 2001), for example; however, if you ‘read’ the image from left to right it begins to resemble a kind of musical score, building to a cosmic climax with satisfying rhythm and logic.
Such an initially misleading appearance of easy doodling takes time to perfect. Milhazes’ approach to her medium is elaborate: she makes her pictures by first applying paint onto sheets of plastic or glass which she then peels off and transfers onto a canvas which she has prepared with background colour and compositional sketches. There’s a playful archaeology at work: such a preoccupation with the origins of the mark that the paintings often appear to have been begun more than once. In Minhas Crianças (My Children, 1999), every sweep and line of colour seems so closely observed and worked upon that the paint seems at moments to wither beneath such intense scrutiny before bouncing back with an unalloyed optimism.
Milhazes has written that the titles she employs - Urubu (Black Vulture, 2001), A Lenda (The Legend, 2001-2) and A Seda (The Silk, 2000), for example - ‘have their own life’ and that there is no connection between the paintings and the words she employs to differentiate them. Of course, once a painting is titled (especially with such evocative references) it becomes impossible to separate the words from the image - in the same way that a snippet of a conversation might float into your head and influence the way you look at a picture when you’re in a gallery. Yet it makes sense, given the lushness of her subject matter, that meanings bloom, wither and bloom again in the constantly mutating space that exists between the word and the object it belongs to. Like the best song titles, a couple of well-placed words can indicate a lexicon of meaning and feeling that shift with time and place. The oblique connection between these ornamented, intensely textured surfaces and enigmatic, disconnected titles creates the kind of disjunction you feel when faintly graffitied wallpaper is uncovered in the process of a building’s demolition - you have no access to the graffiti’s original meaning, but you are linked to it by its sheer physicality and evocation of common humanity.
That Milhazes’ painted surfaces also evoke heady cross-cultural references to other times and places is obvious, yet certain periods and influences spring more readily to mind than others. That the word ‘baroque’ is most likely a derivation of the Portugese word for a ‘misshapen pearl’ makes it, in Milhazes’ case, a more than usually appropriate adjective. Here, however, its trademark capriciousness and theatricality collide with the syncopated rhythms of Piet Mondrian and the figuration of early Brazilian Modernism, exemplified in the bright, semi-Surreal paintings of Tarila do Amaral. The neo-Concretism of Hélio Oiticica is also particularly relevant here: as an artist who responded with uninhibited sensuality to the geometric abstraction which flourished in 1950s Brazil, and attempted to invoke altered states of perception via colour and music, his spirit can be felt less in the look of Milhazes’ images than in her restless juggling of references to life beyond the picture plane.
Her pictures are saturated with the kind of assumptions you might have about Brazil when you’ve never been there: jostling, intense colours; sub-tropical atmosphere and near-physical urgency - the feeling that you would never need to wander far to find the music. Yet although all of these elements are present and accounted for, Milhazes plays cultural cliché and tropicalist kitsch against the unyielding rationalism of hard lines, surrounding chaos with cool areas of unfettered colour. It’s an approach which lends her paintings a tension and dynamism that steers familiar iconography into less obviously charted territory. Geometric abstraction lurks behind flourishes of an unfettered brightness like a sturdy garden shed hides behind an explosion of hybrid flowers - or a smooth gold ring embraces the wrinkles on an ancient finger.
Jennifer Higgie
Garden of Earthly Delights
Getting back to nature at the Eden Project in Cornwall
Imagine a giant spider; I’m not talking tarantulas here, but an arachnid worthy of the best 1950s sci-fi movies, one that is as wide as St Paul’s Cathedral and as tall as the Empire State Building. Now imagine this creature crawling through the countryside and suddenly coming upon a crater. Slowly it dips its abdomen into the ground, then quietly starts laying its eggs.
This, at first sight, is how the eight interlocking geodesic domes at Eden present themselves. Nestled at the bottom of an old china clay pit near St Austell in Cornwall, these massive structures (the largest is 55 m high, 240 m long and 110 m wide - without any internal support) glisten in the sun like some weird, organic bubble-wrap that is about to pop open and spew forth new life.
The architect behind these strangely beautiful yet otherworldly creations is Nicholas Grimshaw. Despite having designed the Financial Times printing works in London Docklands (1988) and the Eurostar International Terminal at Waterloo (1993), with its sinuous, almost fluid roof, Grimshaw is not yet a household name (unlike Richard Rogers or Norman Foster, both of whom are also ‘hi-tech’ architects in their own ways). Eden however, will surely change that. Set to imprint itself on the public’s imagination rather like the Sydney Opera House or the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, it will undoubtedly become an architectural Mecca.
The structure’s antecedents are not hard to locate if you think about the long-standing English love affair with all things horticultural; an obsession with gardens and greenhouses that blossomed in the Palm House at Kew, designed by Decimus Burton and Richard Turner in the mid-19th century. Although Grimshaw has also undoubtedly been influenced by the work of such great Victorian engineers as Burton, Turner and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (not to mention the American inventor Robert Buckminster Fuller, whose creation of the geodesic dome in the 1930s marked him out as a pioneer when it came to the utilization of basic geometric shapes), Eden is a building for the new millennium.
As such, it draws as much from nature’s blueprints as it does from architectural tradition. Its organic shape is akin to the cellular, hexagonal cells that make up a fly’s eyes and even the material used to fill each hollowed-out, galvanized steel frame has an organic undertone: the pillows are made of triple-layered ethylenetetrafluoroethylene, which acts like a soft mucous membrane. They are also flexible, highly transparent to a wide spectrum of light, anti-static, resistant to dirt, wind and the weather, and, most importantly, weigh only one percent of an equivalent structure in glass.
So much for the outside then, but what of the inside? Rather like Dr Who’s Tardis, once you gain entry, the domes feel even larger than they at first appeared. There are two separate spheres: the Humid Tropics Biome and the Warm Temperate Biome. The former is awe-inspiring, like a cathedral with transparent walls and pews made out of layer upon layer of greenery from Amazonia, Malaysia, Oceania and West Africa. It’s replete with a waterfall, a grove of pineapples, palms, vanilla, jade vines, passion flowers, cocoa and the weird Dutchman’s pipe. Looking down from above, people move through the misty undergrowth like ants and you can’t help but feel that you are in some strange, futuristic dream; or perhaps, like Bruce Dern in the cult sci-fi film Silent Running (1971), you’re orbiting Saturn on board a star ship containing the last horticultural specimens from a planet ravaged by nuclear war.
The atmosphere in the Warm Temperate Biome is less otherworldly - the domes themselves are slightly smaller - but by no means unimpressive. This is home to more familiar Mediterranean, South African and Californian species, with olive trees jostling next to grape vines, sugar berries, oranges, lemons and cacti. In fact, Eden can boast over 4,500 different species of plants; in addition, over the next few weeks staff will begin introducing a selection of butterflies, birds and reptiles into each enclosure.
Tim Smit, Eden’s chief executive, was a former rock band producer, but more appropriately he was also the power house behind the rediscovery of Heligan (a garden - similarly located in Cornwall - that had been left derelict and overgrown, rather like a horticultural Sleeping Beauty, for over 70 years). With Eden, Smit wanted to ‘create the world in a day’, a place that will excite and inspire and where we can learn about our planet and how to care for the biosphere, which wittingly or unwittingly we do so much to destroy.
Eden is not supposed to be an exhibition, a museum or, as the brochure succinctly puts it, ‘Disneyland with dahlias’; indeed, if this is what it turns out to be, Smit will feel he has failed. With this in mind, jostling alongside the biomes, the restaurants and the Arena there is an education centre, and all the projects will be underpinned by the research carried out by the horticulturists that form Eden’s ‘Green Team’ and the Eden Institute.
In short, Eden is a gateway to the entwined world of people and plants, to our interwoven history, and, from genesis to completion, a revelation of truly biblical proportions.
Angelica Jacob
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