Etlingera elatior/Bastão

Maria Klabin is not only a painter but also a dancer (an art form she has practised since childhood), a sculptor and a photographer (she moved to New York in the late 1990s to further her studies in the field). Photography is also intimately related to her painterly practice of depicting large-scale landscapes. Often, the artist uses an image photographed by herself as the starting point from which to develop her work on the canvas. In connection with her 2022 solo show at Nara Roesler in New York, the gallery wrote the following in the presentation of the exhibition Liquid Air:

Klabin finds in the photos visual pretexts that lead her to creating her own image. She begins with the movements of her body, drawing, with the brush, a choreography over the surface of the canvas. The physical attraction to the material is a manifest presence in Klabin’s work, modelling the paint on the canvas to create figurations through the encounter between two bodies, hers and the painting’s.

The curator of the exhibition, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Ph.D. (born 1960, Venezuelan/American poet, art historian, curator [Latin American Art curator at MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York between 2006 and 2017] and author of eleven poetry books, seven collections of essays, and numerous art exhibition catalogues), also saw the origin of the artist’s work in her own body, noting that ‘Maria Klabin relates her decision to become a painter to her experience as a dancer. Dance – the body in movement, the body in space – is, therefore, involved in her practice, which, paradoxically, began in three-dimensional modelling.’

For Klabin, painting is an answer to a question that she does not yet know how to formulate. ‘I have the feeling that painting knows more about me than I do about it,’ she has stated about her creative process. It all starts with a gesture, a mark that she makes on the canvas with her brush, a call and response, as each mark proposes a challenge, a question which needs an answer, through another brushstroke and another gesture, ultimately leading to a resolution and the creation of the final, dreamlike image.

Etlingera elatior/Bastão belongs to a recent group of large, sometimes almost mural-sized, landscape paintings. These works embody contemplative and oneiric perceptions departed from fragments of autobiographical elements (distilled from what Klabin describes as an ‘improbable and fluid patchwork of memory’) and resulting in non-objectifiable and enticing, yet daunting, compositions. Klabin probes the mundane to extract, magnify, and exalt the rhythms of everyday existence. Her colour-saturated paintings are both surrealistic and semi-autobiographical, often featuring motifs that come to the artist in her dreams. At the heart of Klabin’s practice lies her near-constant assemblage of personal source materials: drawings, photographs, notes, and other fragments of daily life that serve as the backbone of her subject matter. According to the artist, her work unfolds like a story or a diary, documenting scenes that may be fictional yet resonate with our shared human experience.

The exact meaning (if there is one) of the work Etlingera elatior/Bastão is hard to pin down. At first glance, it appears to be a colourful, expressive depiction of exotic nature. The Etlingera elatior (also known as ‘torch ginger’, among other names) is a species of herbaceous perennial plant in the family Zingiberaceae, native to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Equatorial Guinea and New Guinea, whose showy pink flowers are used in decorative arrangements and are an important ingredient in food across Southeast Asia. When Firestorm Foundation acquired the piece at CFHILL in Stockholm at the 2025 exhibition Carnival: An Odyssey of Brazilian Art, however, it was exhibited under the title Bastão. This Portuguese noun (from Old-Galician-Portugese ‘baston’) is most commonly translated into ‘stick’, ‘walking stick’ or ‘wand’. Could this be a reference to the artist’s practice of relaying fragments of her dreams (in which she has wandered through magical exotic Southeast Asian landscapes) in her pictorial output?

Klabin’s artistic process has been described as ‘laying in constantly producing and assembling drawings, photographs, and annotations, combined with an accumulation of thoughts and images that entwine to make sense as a whole, unveiling intriguing relations that form the backbone of the artist’s pictorial endeavour.’ In her own words, Klabin develops her work ‘as if writing a story, or a diary, but a diary of things that don’t really happen. It’s a narrative that could only be told through painting, but that touches themes that seem closer to writers than to painters.’

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Carnival: An Odyssey of Brazilian Art, 11 April-9May 2025.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation