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Lot Essay
With Les fenêtres (The Windows), Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva plunges us into her disorientating visual universe of shattered perspective and jubilant colour. A resplendent example of the Portuguese artist’s unique imagination, this painting was executed during a period of international recognition, with major contemporary exhibitions in Turin and New York. Precariously balancing figuration and abstraction, Les fenêtres finds the artist purveying her surroundings in characteristic existentialism. A gridded orchestra of lattices encompasses the entire composition, non-systematic and subjective in their configuration. Rather than trying to optically comprehend Vieira da Silva’s complex amorphous perspective, the viewer is content to become immersed in the perplexing wonderment of this figurative hotchpotch; pictorial space is manifested according to Vieira da Silva’s subjective experience alone. Chromatically, the work is dominated by slithers of deep ultramarine blue, evoking an enveloping sky that liberates the viewer from the claustrophobic melee of intersecting lines. Vieira da Silva produced her first stained-glass window in 1964, the year before she executed Les fenêtres, which perhaps explains the current work’s alluring quasi-translucent glow. With its energetic fusion of collapsed spatial depth, vibrant colour and expressionistic brushstrokes, the work illuminates a skewed alternate world in flux.
Vieira da Silva’s visual realms are constructed from recollections of personal experience and external components of place and atmosphere. It is, for instance, certainly possible to see the flat, colourful square forms in Les fenêtres in relation to the azulejos tiles that smother many of the buildings in the artist’s native Lisbon. Additionally, the urgent ferocity of the scene resonates with Gustav Eiffel’s nineteenth-century engineering, remnants of which laced the streets of Paris, the city Vieira da Silva settled in permanently after the Second World War. Crucially, as a ravaged post-war world hovered on a tightrope between partial salvation and further devastation, Vieira da Silva managed to capture the misdirection of humanity, and subsequent unforetold consequences, in pictorial format. Gisela Rosenthal, in her monograph on the artist, commented on this pictorial metaphor, writing that ‘in the years after the War, by multiplying the spatial perspectives to create a new, bewildering diversity, [Vieira da Silva] gradually transformed pictorial space into a symbol of the forlornness and lack of orientation of modern man’ (G. Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva: The Quest for Unknown Space, Köln, 1998, pp. 54-55). This impetus continued deep into the following decades, as Les fenêtres superbly demonstrates; a world in constant change and uncertainty, captured by an exceptional artist with a unique and singular vision.
Vieira da Silva’s visual realms are constructed from recollections of personal experience and external components of place and atmosphere. It is, for instance, certainly possible to see the flat, colourful square forms in Les fenêtres in relation to the azulejos tiles that smother many of the buildings in the artist’s native Lisbon. Additionally, the urgent ferocity of the scene resonates with Gustav Eiffel’s nineteenth-century engineering, remnants of which laced the streets of Paris, the city Vieira da Silva settled in permanently after the Second World War. Crucially, as a ravaged post-war world hovered on a tightrope between partial salvation and further devastation, Vieira da Silva managed to capture the misdirection of humanity, and subsequent unforetold consequences, in pictorial format. Gisela Rosenthal, in her monograph on the artist, commented on this pictorial metaphor, writing that ‘in the years after the War, by multiplying the spatial perspectives to create a new, bewildering diversity, [Vieira da Silva] gradually transformed pictorial space into a symbol of the forlornness and lack of orientation of modern man’ (G. Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva: The Quest for Unknown Space, Köln, 1998, pp. 54-55). This impetus continued deep into the following decades, as Les fenêtres superbly demonstrates; a world in constant change and uncertainty, captured by an exceptional artist with a unique and singular vision.