Paris | Via VARIG

Noêmia Guerra is a Brazilian painter who has been working in Paris for the past seven years, where she is currently exhibiting her work for the first time. Having left behind an entire life built in another direction to devote herself exclusively to painting, the artist worked almost anonymously during all this time. Her first exhibition opened last week at the Galerie Jacques Massol.

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The painter made no concessions to get where she is. She painted up until the moment when, due to circumstances, her art caught the attention of connoisseurs. It was they who sought her out in her Montparnasse studio. The twenty-two paintings—depicting Brazilian landscapes or sketching figures drawn from our national regionalism—are now hanging on the gallery’s walls. The artist’s joy is immense—and openly acknowledged.

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THE CRITIC

Noêmia Guerra is a Brazilian painter who has been working in Paris for the past seven years, where she is currently exhibiting her work for the first time. Having left behind an entire life built in another direction to devote herself exclusively to painting, the artist worked almost anonymously during all this time. Her first exhibition opened last week at the Galerie Jacques Massol.

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Noêmia Guerra’s exhibition is introduced in the catalogue by G.S. Whittet, an English critic who dedicated twenty years of his life to painting for the art publication he directed. He writes:

 

“If her name means war, her painting means peace. Peace attained when the conflict between ideas, pigments, and their application is resolved. When I first saw Noêmia Guerra’s paintings in an apartment near the sky in the Montparnasse district, they shone with a deep, shadowy beauty in rich purples, where spring-green and floral-red banners symbolized her battle emblems. I saw them again, later, in a gallery set in a London basement, where their exotic and intense flavor seemed even richer.
Knowing the paintings led me to know the painter.
This woman from Rio de Janeiro possesses a seriousness that comes from deep life experience—its sorrows and joys, its simplicities and disappointments.”

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Further on, Whittet adds:

 

“For Noêmia Guerra, each painting becomes a banner, a standard of faith in the devotion to the realm where Piero della Francesca worked, where Rembrandt poured his sweat, and where Cézanne tested his sensations.

Her painting holds a strength that belongs to a woman who, with full lucidity, followed her calling. Art is the autograph of personality. As science progresses, art recedes. But fortunately, there are still painters who trust the compass of their own inner magnetism.
Noêmia Guerra is one of them: she asks of viewers nothing more than their eyes. Once captivated, these eyes lead us to the land of light, where there is nothing to seek and no path to follow. We simply look—and receive.

Colored, rich, and resonant surfaces radiate a luminosity that is Painting.”

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He concludes:

 

“As a poet, I believe that in these landscapes of light, so generously offered, Noêmia Guerra embraces life with a courageous joy that few of us possess. As a critic, I am certain that her message is readable without a code—that this is painting in its purest state, with universal meaning.”