Pigments extracted from nature are revealed in Flávia Vieira’s works as living archives of the earth, bringing to light invisible histories: traces of colonial exploration, but also signs of resistance, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge. Each tone, each patch of color, is a historical testament.

Flávia Vieira’s project “El otro color” explores the colonial and cultural relations between Central America and Europe through the history of the Palo de Campeche, a tree whose black pigment influenced European fashion and economics in the 16th and 17th centuries. Featuring images of the only known specimen of this tree in Spain, as well as collections from the Prado Museum and the Costume Museum, the video critically reflects on the identity, power, and diaspora of black in the Western imagination. (…) Excerpt from the text by Bruno Leitão

José de Guimarães International Arts Center – CIAJG

Guimarães, Portugal

Curated by João Terras and Marta Mestre, text by Marta Mestre

“Milagro,” by Flávia Vieira, is an essay, an open and contingent dialogue with pre-Columbian artifacts from the CIAJG collection. The thirty-three objects come from the Inca, Chimú, Chancay, Moche, Aztec, Nicoya, Misteca, Talamameque, and Nayarit cultures, which occupied parts of Central and South America, and belong to a chronological period between approximately 500 BC and 1532 AD. The installation, spread across two rooms, evokes a spatial and chromatic thought that revives manual traditions from a time that no longer exists.

Project Room – Auroras São Paulo – Brazil, 2019

Text by Thierry Freitas

Working with wool is part of Flávia Vieira’s (1983, Portugal) daily life. The artist needs time, discipline, and technical rigor to create the weavings she has been producing for several years. Created stitch by stitch, artisanally and manually, and often using natural pigments, these works frequently feature woven figures based on the iconography of the body paintings of Brazilian indigenous peoples, such as the Karajá and Asurini. In “Pandã,” an installation in the Auroras Project Room, Flávia discusses the place of decoration in the visual arts by equalizing hierarchies between materials and blending so-called “erudite” and popular references.

“Brasilina” is Flávia Vieira’s second solo exhibition at Kubikgallery, in Porto. There is no way to talk about this exhibition without first telling a story – that of the ‘Brazilian’. It was only in the 14th century that many pigments and dyeing methods made their way to Europe.

Blush finds a political meaning in makeup pigment, as it participates in a symbolic and ritualistic operation. Whether in Western contexts (in the individual sphere, in the theater…), as well as in non-Western contexts (body painting in indigenous cultures), makeup is the expression of a fantasy, a disguise, an artifice, a fake action. It is in this “cosmetics” conferred by the pigment that an identity “mask” is constructed.

Hopes and Fears a solo exhibition by artist Flávia Vieira at Kubikgallery.

Exhibition Forma do Desassossego.

Curated by Luísa Telles. OLHÃO, São Paulo, Brazil