In his notes on boat trips along the rivers of the Amazon, Diô Viana has been capturing Amazonian landscapes and environments. The artist draws, paints, collects and records in his notebooks traces of the infinite natural elements found in the region. The notes, which are not illustrations, he calls “visual diaries”. The sketches made and the materials collected are then reworked in the studio, generating paintings, prints and mixed techniques. An entire biome pulsates, in images and rhythms, in the works that result from the trips.
This pulsation, which reproduces the feeling of life in the Amazon biome in a distant place like Rio de Janeiro, or France – where the artist also resides – originates from a deep, rooted relationship with the region. Diô was born and raised in the state of Pará, and it is possible to perceive in his works the respect, delicacy and intimacy with which he treats the elements he inserts in the images and the ease with which he relates the set of signs and procedures that make up his repertoire.
Painting has a sensorial quality that favors immersion. Amidst the set of larger paintings, one has the feeling of being engulfed by the force of the elements, by the colours, volumes and movements, which bring even the sounds and aromas of the forest closer together. An involving and synthetic sensoriality emerges from the blues, from the combinations with reds and earth tones, ochres, from the half-submerged greens.
The reflections of the images create a condition of continuous and circular movement, and fill our senses with the eternal evolution of the omnipresent waters of the region. Whether evoking droplets in the atmosphere, rain or the course of a river, the same rhythm is felt.
A poetics of the waters is glimpsed, among forms that vanish.
The presence of the black colour, from charcoal on the ground to the night sky dotted with lights, takes us back to the mystery. It carries the imagery of abrasion, comments on an ongoing process, carried out by insane minds to satisfy the selfish greed of the insensitive. Minds whose humanity proves unlikely.
And from the powerful but fragile biome, from the guardian populations of the habitat, from the animal and plant species, from the water and mineral resources, from the still undisclosed source of life and knowledge, comes the alert for an increasingly present future in which, in the lands scorched by forest fires and deforestation, the waters will no longer flow freely.
– Fabiana Eboli Santos
Courtesy of John Szoke Gallery, New York.