Martha Pagy Escritório de Arte
Lica Cecato: Dreaming of a Borderless World
Lica invites us to participate in a world without borders, in the phrase that gives the title to the exhibition; and that is part of the lyrics of one of her musical compositions, with Stefano Scutari, Como Num Cinema (2021). Can we say that the territory of art is without borders? I believe that for Lica Cecato, yes. Her practice circulates freely through various artistic languages: she writes, plays, sings, draws, photographs, and creates her art into small assemblages made by recycled Japanese packaging boxes, the Dreamboxes. And now she has expanded her dreamlike universe from the boxes, opening up their sides onto the space of canvases. However, she still keeps on the new works the same everyday elements, the little plastic figures, architectural models for scale models, an action inherited from pop art.
In the ten canvases on display today at Martha Pagy Escritório de Arte, in addition to the use of acrylic and watercolour paints, she adds some stone pigments, from Japan, China and India, using ancient and millenary techniques. As Lica explains, ‘stone dust doesn't dye, it agglutinates’ and thus keeps its vibrant hue unchanged through the ages, as in Asian art, which has used these stone pigments since ancient times. What we see in these unique and unprecedented works are bright colours in basic shapes, a pictorial surface that reveals its touches and gestures throughout the apparent brushstrokes; a powerfully expressive force concentrated in just a few elements, as in an oriental ideogram. Most of the works gravitate around a centre, as in a barycentre, which in geometry represents the gravitational centre of the surface of a flat figure. For Lica, this centre focuses our attention and intentions, all in a single ideogram; ‘the earth we live on, the centre of our galaxy, the heart of the human being, the bridge at the end of the road and the last ladder before the end of the world. Noah's boat. The head and the brain.’ And finally, the dream from which her art is born. She demarcates her place, ‘the new paintings and photographs are places to dream.’
In this show, the artist also exhibits six beautiful photographs printed on canvases each individually re-touched in watercolour and acrylic. They are abstract patterns with organic, fluid shapes and colours that contrast the light refracted and reflected on the surfaces of the water in Venice's canals and lakes; the blue reflections of the sky against the colours of the brick and stone architecture of the buildings that will one day be submerged in the water.
In her art Lica expresses a poetic hope, the search for a centre of balance, a point of convergence between man and the cosmos, Eastern and Western cultures, and of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It is a powerful and inspiring affirmation of the possibility that art could sustain the dream of saving our planet from climate and ecological disaster, and of living in a world without wars, free of imposed borders and demarcated territories.
Paula Terra-Neale (art historian and independent curator)
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