In this text, published in the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Galeria Raquel Arnaud in 1993, Maria Alice Milliet sets forth an overall analysis of the artwork of Nazareth Pacheco. In this artist, the writer sees a set of qualities capable of reviving the relationship between art and the viewing public, which Milliet regards as “anaesthetized.” Revealing her great creative and contemplative force (as well as her potential for experimentation), Nazareth leads us to a perceptive “contemplation of the identity forged in the history of the body.” It is a body stigmatized since infancy by problems related to birth and various actions or corrective interventions to which it is subjected. In addition, it has a female corporality (in general), however much it is submitted to aesthetic requirements. This description may refer to the residue of Pacheco’s personal history or more broadly it may define “the feminine” within its limited scope—the links between pleasure and pain that give rise to fetishism. In the critic’s opinion, these are the components of a “historical body.” This work is provocative, coherent, and marked by the artist’s ability to go beyond any personal or subjective limit. In other words, what Nazareth achieves with such artistic efforts is simply “to transcend herself.”

The art critic Maria Alice Milliet is in charge of the estate of the Coleção Nemirovsky, now integrated into the State Art Gallery of São Paulo. In this introduction, Milliet clarifies how a meditation on individual and female identity is at the heart of the work of Nazareth Pacheco. For Nazareth, this has nothing to do with gratuitous quotations or one more reference to the overworked signs of “politically correct” feminism. In Milliet’s opinion, Nazareth weaves the issue into her work to the point of raising the viewer’s awareness. All this work fits in with that of a large group of artists who appeared in the late 1980s and had the capability of striking up an intense, more direct dialogue with the viewers than that of earlier artists. They did this by “revealing potential, more disturbing content,” which exposed their sensitivity to the point of constructing a poetics that took shape around the body and identity.

In this regard, see the feminist approaches among members of the Geração 80 in the essay “Quatro artistas” by Aracy Amaral [doc. no. 1110458], and by the same critic, “Espelhos e sombras” [doc. no. 1111060], about women painters of that generation, particularly, the works of Nazareth Pacheco (in which making yourself beautiful is mixed up with torture).