Leda Catunda (São Paulo, Brazil, 1961). Visual artist, researcher and teacher. One of the exponents of Geração 80, she explores in her work issues related to the representation of images and the pop universe.
A graduate of Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Faap) in São Paulo, Leda is a student of Regina Silveira (1939), Nelson Leirner (1932) and Julio Plaza (1938-2003). During her training, she became bored with having to draw so much at the request of her professors, so she started looking for drawings already available on the market.
Among her first works are Vedações (1983). In this series, the artist appropriates printed fabrics, generally figurative, and erases some information with ink, recreating the print. She uses painting conceptually: brush and paint serve to highlight, erase, recreate, or criticize a world already covered in images. As canvases, she uses apparently banal items found in popular commercial areas, such as flannels, bathroom curtains, blankets, towels and fabrics, generally used in domestic environments.
The following year, still using materials available on the market, Leda made more figurative paintings, such as Aquário(1984). In this work, she appropriates images of fish from a plastic curtain to paint a glass tank around them. The artist calls these works paintings-objects.
According to Leda, the interest for kitsch and popular universe comes from the absence of this repertoire in her parents' house. Daughter of architects, the residence where she lives during her childhood is decorated with few objects and, in general, with planned design. It is the Portuguese grandmother's house that awakens the artist's interest in popular and artisanal elements of decoration, such as crocheted towels. The visual repertoire begins to form during walks with her grandmother through the popular commerce in largo de Pinheiros, in São Paulo.
Still at the beginning of her career, Leda's painting (like that of other artists of the 1980s) caught the attention of the main critics, gallery owners, and curators of the time. In 1983, at the age of 22, she participated in the group show Pintura Como Meio at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC/USP), alongside artists Ciro Cozzolino (1959), Sergio Romagnolo (1957), Ana Maria Tavares (1958), and Sérgio Niculitcheff (1960), curated by Aracy Amaral (1930). For the curator, the talent and freshness of these young artists' production lies in the contemporary way they use painting, seeking less usual supports than the framed canvas and highlighting less noble materials on the wall, such as "cloth".
The following year, Leda took part in the iconic exhibition Como Vai Você, Geração 80?, which summarizes the production of 123 artists of the time at Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. Fresh out of college, still in the 1980s, she exhibits her work at the 1st Havana Biennial (Cuba) and at the 17th and 18th Bienal de São Paulo.
In the late 1980s, she began to distance herself from figurative work, a procedure that gained strength in the following decade. In her abstract works, the texture and pattern of the material are still present, but she explores geometric forms, as in the production presented in the 1992 solo exhibition at Galeria São Paulo.
During this decade, Leda created what she calls painting-installation, that is, works with greater volume and dimension. Geometric forms acquire an abstract appearance, as in Siameses (1998). This phase is simultaneous to the master's research developed at the School of Communication and Arts (ECA), which receives an indication for a direct doctorate, defended in 2003. In the thesis, Leda researches the "poetics of softness," in which she studies her own production and that of other artists who have explored the use of softened forms. In 2014, these soft structures begin to give way to harder materials, when the artist makes Nó, considered her first sculpture, made of wood, in which she explores the image of formica that imitates wood.
Beginning in the 2000s, she applies photographic images to her paintings. First, she uses photos from his personal collection, with friends and family, as in Todo Pessoal (2006). Later, she appropriates images sent by friends or found on the Internet. With the phenomenon of social networks, the photos posted by users enter his repertoire, as in Mar Linda (2016), in which she uses photos from a young woman's profile. This work is part of the exhibition I love You, Baby, in 2016, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. In it, she presents paintings that work with what she calls "affective consumption," exploring the use of logos and images of desire, such as landscapes of beach vacations.
Leda Catunda's work is based on the use of images, fabrics, and prints available to everyone. As she herself says: "I like to like what others are liking"[1]. Attentive to the behavior of the people around her, to what they are wearing and doing, the artist captures these references, transforming them into raw material for her work, without losing the critical and acid tone, which is accentuated in her cushioned and colorful universe.
Note
1. interview by Leda Catunda to Vogue magazine's "Frame by Frame" program, during the exhibition O Gosto dos Outros, held at Galeria Fortes D'Aloia e Gabriel's Galpão in April 2015 (7 min). Available at: https://youtu.be/YqZ8xyFYMHY. Accessed on: October 15, 2019.
LEDA Catunda. In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa10215/leda-catunda>. Accessed on: June 25, 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7