Suspension du noir

A symbol of fertility in ancient times (1), black is the soil Jo Guerreiro has chosen to give birth to her forms. Sometimes in the liquid of ink, sometimes in the grease of oil paint, fragments appear before our eyes.

In narrow square paper formats, she starts with a violent brushstroke, then a second to stretch the ink. She allows herself only one gesture, no repentance is possible. A shadow is revealed, autonomous, like a silver bath that lets the photographic image emerge. The image suspended on the paper, both frozen and fleeting, is ready to escape, but is quickly contained by the tightness of the frame. Jo Guerreiro captures the feverish moment, the sensation, and tries to contain a flow over which only matter has control: she captures what escapes her.  

The same vitality is found in her large-format oils, but her relationship to space is radically different: her whole body is engaged in the weight of the marouflaged canvas, and the physical act takes on a different dimension. From then on, she reworked her gestures and manipulated the paint, taking advantage of the pleasure afforded by the slippery fat of the oil. Unlike the inks, where the white is only subject to the sovereign black, here the form is structured and constructed using this same white. What Jo Guerreiro cannot do in one medium, she allows herself in the other, the two combining to become her intimate writing.  

Like Takesada Matsutani, one of her influences, she remains faithful to the principle of "dialoguing with the material, allowing chance and spontaneous gesture to intervene" (2). However, it is not impulsiveness alone that dictates her creative act. The artist would be more on the side of Fabienne Verdier, who also puts a lot of thought into her notebooks beforehand. Jo Guerreiro follows a strict protocol and imposes a real discipline on her own body: she starts from her driving force, which is intention, chooses her direction, works hard and only stops when she surprises herself with the vertigo she has just created. Rigour allows for accidents, the frame allows for escape. And so these ambivalent forms are born, caught between two worlds. The abrupt gesture and the marked line of this charcoal black expand into soft, almost sensual variations of grey. A narrative can be read in this passage from dark to light, where contrasts blend together to offer our eyes the invisible that is hiding there.

Esther Poupée

(1): Michel Pastoureau, Noir. History of a colour. 2008

(2): Valérie Douniaux and Takesada Matsutani, "Interview with Takesada Matsutani", Perspective, 1 | 2020, p. 111-124