In this text, Sheila Leirner praises a show of work by Carmela Gross as a clear demonstration of a thought process at work. Leirner remarks on the radical and artistically revolutionary stance of these works in relation to traditional drawing and its processes; Gross demystifies the sensitive stroke, subjective interpretation, and the ties between the artist and the instruments of creation. The artist, who is from São Paulo, makes use of an analytic and intellectual process to construct four series of panels with seals and notebooks. The elements at the center of these works are the line, the brushstroke, the scribble, and texture. On the basis of reality, the artist moves into endless reflection on artistic space and on formulations specific to art without inciting sociological or subjective interpretations. In other words, everything exists on a level as aesthetic as it is conceptual. The action of drawing is reduced to the very act of drawing as a repeated and filtered gesture with no creative (that is, aestheticist) implication whatsoever. According to Leirner, Carmela Gross’s works are deliberately tedious; they make the viewer see that they are the product of attempts to represent what could be called “anti-drawing.”

In her text on Carmela Gross’s show Carimbos [Seals] at the Gabinete de Artes Gráficas in São Paulo, art critic Sheila Leirner delves into one of the major areas of Gross’s production, mainly her work with rubber seals on paper. Carmela Gross (b. 1946) participated in the first group show held at the Rex Gallery in São Paulo (1967). In 1972, she was hired as a professor by the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP); other faculty members at the time included artists Regina Silveira and Julio Plaza, and distinguished critic Walter Zanini, who would later become the director of the university’s museum. Gross’s proposals entail the deconstruction of the codes of drawing and the use of sensitive gestures in operations as mental as they are technical.

French-Brazilian journalist and art critic Sheila Leirner formed part of the Conselho de Arte e Cultura da Bienal from 1982 to 1983. She was the curator of the XVIII edition of the São Paulo Biennial held in 1985 and of the XIX edition held in 1987. On both occasions, she fought against nationalist and historicist didacticism (see the 1985 “Introdução” [doc. no. 1111107] and the 1987 “Introdução” [doc. no. 1110910]). Even though it privileged “the return to painting”—the maximum value of the eighties—Leirner’s curatorial vision in those editions of the biennial entailed a radical anarchist stance. After studying the sociology of art in France, she worked as an art critic for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo in 1975. A collection of her essays mainly focused on what was called “the new art” was published under the title Arte e seu tempo (São Paulo: Editôra Perspectiva, 1991). Since 1991, she has lived in Paris where her work revolves around art administration. She was the Latin American representative to the Galeire nationale du Jeu de Paume from 1993 to 1999 and a member of the French chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She has also contributed to countless magazines and supplements in France and Brazil, among them Beaux-Arts Magazine, Europe Magazine Littéraire, Revista da USP, and Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, and sits on the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists.