By Paulo Klein | Art Critic at APCA / ABCA / AICA

IN THE FLOWER OF WOOD, IL MONDO LARA MATANA CONSTRUCTION “I tell you: it takes a great deal of chaos within to give birth to a twinkling star.”

Lara Donatoni Matana is located in the universe of creators who work in harmony with nature, artists who spread around the world in integrated groups, communicating cells, charismatic individuals who act in defense of the planet. More than an aesthetic attitude, it is a search for quality of life that, by itself, already involves your creations with a special aura. Notwithstanding this attainment, Lara's artistic production is developed with wood discards, sustainably and intelligently reused, creating seductive effects from plates, rafters, logs, stumps and taps, slats, splinters, splinters, and blades. Thus she achieves highly effective visual results, which refer to mandalas, kaleidoscopes, rosettes, prisms, and arabesques that explode from her works in a harmonious profusion of colors and shapes. Sometimes they take advantage of the natural coloration of the flora, sometimes get seductive results in geometric arrangements or fractal compositions, sometimes in an elegant, transcendent sobriety that deeply touches those who enjoy or live with them.

If the odyssey was not enough to achieve the results presented to the public there is still the inner dimension, the spiritual energy of protection and kindness to others, which permeates the aesthetic results. The aura of a good adventure, the mantric sound, the silent poem that brings us motives of their coexistence with the principles of Sathya Sai Baba, the pursuit of yogic balance are components in themselves. The artist also refers, whenever possible, to the artists she - somehow - admires and identifies with as Frans Krajcberg, Arthur Lescher and Ascânio MM. In some moments, she synthesizes this relationship in the discourse that extols the magic of Nature, in others the rigor, the pursuit of noble materials or the option to innovate and seduce by looking.

Particularly in the works of the Kaleidoscope series, which are part of this show, as well as in Rosaceae and Prisms, Lara works with the dynamics of drawing with wooden blades, recovered for art after serving as showcases for the industry. These units, naturally dyed or exposed,become her  alphabet, with which she composes her visual poems, permeated by a constructivist verve, which excites those who venture into the trails of visuality but is to be increasingly explored. They are works that change naturally, as our gaze changes with the passing of days, with the variation of light, in a process of apparent evolutionary magic that involves the great works of art. We are facing a luminous “mondo construto” that manifests itself “as the flower of the wood” to bring our emotions “to the skin of the skin”.

THE POETIC OF NATURE LESS BETWEEN ACTIVISM AND ART IN THE WORK OF LARA DONATONI MATANA.

At times, to conceptualize what is poetic is to cling to ready-made opinions, because we constantly lose our ideas, or part of them, because of the incessant stimulation of the senses we suffer. From this point of view, we need to be “touched” by something to begin our search for answers (or questions), where we face an irreversible knowledge process. But it only goes through and moves us because we are incomplete. Incompleteness puts us in a locomotive of thinking of the past instant as a hint of  the instant to come.

This "thinking" locomotive "ziggles" and leads us to consider existence, to realise that before we are human, we are nonhuman. Bacteria that evolutionarily surpassed forms to reach advanced stages and constantly produce themselves. Thus we may think that Maturana and Varela's concept of Autopoiesis traces into the human essence. If man himself is self-poetic, what emanates from this being, in essence, is also self-poetic. And to think that to self-produce it is necessary to have no peremptorily demarcated boundaries is to think that in ourselves, we are open and that we are, before humans, a form of work of art.

Every work of art is a great creative composition, and man is but a tangle of interconnected networks, which intersect in their own self-preserving self-production; evolving and being modified by the constitution and polisemias that affect each other, with more than one possibility of comprehension. There is no way to understand the plural world of contemporaneity with its multifaceted man without a proportionally decentralized and pluralized understanding of art.

The world is the transformed man at the same time that he transforms himself and consequently transforms the world and there we have an intense flow of possibilities. The flow keeps the culture in motion, people as actors and networks of actors, history, customs and traditions in transit and constant crossings. The flow refers to a kind of continuity and passage that lead to certain "limits". Thinkers like Barth in the 1960s contributed to imagining boundaries as something through which contacts and interactions take place; it shows us that they can have an impact on the shape and extent of these contacts, but they do not contain natural isolations within their borders.

If a human being and what emanates from it are art forms, art also gains activist connotations. Activist art not only means political art but also a commitment to direct engagement with the forces of production not mediated by official mechanisms of representation. Of course, this derives from the poetic project that the artist puts himself in search of, which consists of the compilation of variants internal and external factors experienced by the artist subject, in the course of the construction of his work.

Artists often start from an idea, a disquieting instinct in the making of weaving about a particular material - physical or intellectual imagery - a point of view; an opinion, a passion, an experience. The contact with the woody, dusty and knotted core that the wood exudes, caused a productive “flow” in sculptor Lara Donatoni Matana's artistic instinct in such a voracious way that she turned her gaze to art and began to use it as a vector of activism for environmental issues.

There is no way to measure where the wood ends and where the sculptor begins. Both look at each other, talk and find themselves naked of concepts and revealing the strength that man has in finding balance with nature while reframing the look under the arts. The interconnectedness of soul, between becoming activist in an environment that loudly screams, while disconcertingly, we forget where we came from and where we are going. If we are first of all nonhuman, if we are a work of art, we are nature before that. And to her, we owe respect, care, and preservation.

The work built by Lara, in these more than 13 years of artistic production dialoguing with wood, shows that not even in the end, an absolute end exists. From scraps, a fresh start is made if possible. The unthinkable proves that the relativity of actions, whether social, artistic, political, is tangible. Just switch to using, as Appadurai said, the free imagination in our mind. Our most powerful weapon. Our most voracious soul. Our most intense essence.

By Caroline Araújo | Advertiser and Art Critic

By Aline Figueiredo | Curator and Art Critic

Lara Donatoni Matana was born in Andradina-SP in 1969 and has lived in Cuiabá since 1983. From 2001 onwards, she began her first creative research using leftover wood and is now able to show interest in her diverse production.

Mato Grosso, this great state of timber, wins another artist with sensitivity to take advantage of the industrial waste of this noble matter, whose fate, unfortunately, still largely goes to waste or the furnace. For over 15 years, he has been in contact with the Industrial District, located on the outskirts of Greater Cuiabá, which, through the Association of Industrialists, has directed efforts to encourage artists. At the end of last year, I visited the beautiful installation of Roberto de Almeida, our wood animal sculptor. Wife of one of the industrialists, Lara Donatoni Matana uses the collective workshop installed in the shed of the District. For larger pieces, therefore, at home she has her own workshop to work on the detailing.

It is worth considering that Lara's gaze is not unrelated to the rubble. Remains of rafters and slats, blades, stumps and taps, dropped in time, are of use to her. Hence the diversity of her production, because it is the pieces of matter, in this case, the wood, whether large, thick, wide or thin, which drive the creative gesture. It is the material piece, because, with its specificities, it defines the expressive structure of the support, be it for the floor, wall, hanging or moving through furniture. All with interesting sensory character. Incidentally, objects hung or attached to living room tables as I saw, which resemble the shapes of animals, like snakes or worms, have great optical and playful movements. In time: I believe that in the playful field of these works, light and malleable, is the best identification with the designer, in which Lara is manifesting herself.

She also works with blades from outdated industrial showcases she has gained from local firms. With this kind of material, smaller and thin, the artist develops compositions of geometric nature. There, the shapes vary, from allusions to kites, the round shapes resemble mandalas or the rectangular ones suggest braids of indigenous iconography. These blades, which are already colored in red, black, beige or brown, are very well used by her to exercise the constructive side of her invention. This side of her which, I believe, leaves her the greatest depth in which to explore.

More recently, she has been working with large and heavy pieces, more suitable for the floor. Look at the logs for a long time, until you gain the expressive intimacy that will suggest and induce what interferes and recreates in them. Now she retains the grooves she considers most expressive, opens cracks and introduces small geometric pieces of wood; Now she adds to them, large pieces, smoothed by the lathes, thus dialoguing between the rustic and the intervention of the machine. Now in April, Lara Donatoni Matana was invited to participate in the II Brazil Certified Fair, in São Paulo, to bring together artists from all over the country who use recyclable and politically correct materials. In this show, the artist will exhibit examples of the three most expressive strands of her work, namely the massive floor pieces, the blades in constructive compositions and the malleable and kinetic objects.