Gabriela Giroletti: Inevitable Orbits

Smooth shimmering surfaces, tumbling abstract shapes and electric pulsing forms. Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach is delighted to announce its summer exhibition, Inevitable Orbits, a solo presentation by the Brazilian artist Gabriela Giroletti whose practice explores the emotional experience of being in nature. Looking up to the sky and beyond, Giroletti’s latest series of paintings contemplates the vastness of the universe in relation to the human body, imagining the sensations and movements of celestial elements.

 

For Giroletti art-making is a process of translation, of making sense of her experiences while at the same time creating something new. While her paintings tend to emerge from periods of introspection, the act of mark making is quick and spontaneous. ‘I often feel like the work makes itself,’ she says. It’s only when I stop and stand back to look that I can really begin to understand what I’ve made.’ We see this tension, between fast and slow movements, internal and external worlds, play out on the canvas through visual contrasts: sweeping and scattered brushstrokes, areas of translucency and opacity, warm and cold colours. In Cloudburst an amorphous, grey-blue floating mass explodes, sending black spikes – a defense mechanism? rays of energy? – towards and seemingly beyond the edges of the canvas, which itself is defined by an intense shade of pink. In Moonlanding, a giant, luminous orb comprising fluid streaks of silvery white rises into what could be the sky filled with dust or some inner part of the human body. As always with Giroletti’s work there is a deliberate ambiguity that invites shifting interpretations, a slippage between forms and perspectives.

 

This interest in the boundaries or the lack of them, the points at which things meet, intermingle, gain form or collapse into shapelessness is central to Giroletti’s practice. This is perhaps most apparent in the painting Old Moons. Inside a black, roughly defined rectangular shape, forms tumble over and around each other, creating the impression of a churning, unstable surface, clouds of smoke, bodily innards. Beyond this is a yellow border that grows in intensity up to and around the edges of the canvas and deep red teardrop shapes – sculptural objects attached to the stretcher bar – that appear as if they have been produced by the inner tumult or some kind of building pressure. Elsewhere, as in Seas of Skies or Plateau, it is the boundaries themselves that extend the painted surface, creating little mounds that are almost creature-like in their tactility. These added elements as well as the texture of the paint itself invite us to engage with the paintings in a different way, to see them not just as images, but as objects that we can relate to and understand through their relationship to our bodies.

 

This journey from the body into the sky or more broadly, nature and back to the body is what Giroletti describes as an ‘inevitable orbit’, it is how we come to understand the world around us and our place within it. It is a term that describes, like her work, the interconnectedness of all things, the pulse of life.