Limiar
Julia da Mota

"(...) Amid those landscapes roams the soul,
disappears, returns, draws nearer, moves away,
a stranger to itself, elusive,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.”

Wislawa Szymborska, in “Tortures”

Trained as an architect, Julia da Mota now seeks other ways to build in this world. She accesses inner spaces rather than designing buildings. By exploring the idea of landscape — that stretch of territory the eye can grasp in a glance — the artist expands the meaning of what sight captures and translates the concept into an internal movement, an intimate construction.

This poetic exercise takes shape through watercolor and diluted acrylic paint, investigating the edge of things — the relationships between pigment and surface, geometry and fluidity, inside and out, opacity and transparency, control and its absence. In this state where painting becomes “a world without objects, without interruption or obstacle,” as suggested by Canadian artist Agnes Martin, “one must accept the need to enter a field of vision as if crossing an empty beach to look at the ocean.”¹

In a dance between the physical and the sensory, Julia da Mota’s works mediate two worlds. Planes split in half, overlapping horizons, and the confrontation of the body — first the artist’s, then the viewer’s — in front of each painting.

In this new series — created right after an artist residency in Palma de Mallorca, Spain — the artist continues to explore the organic nature of her practice. Da Mota does not use rulers or tape to mark the areas to be occupied by color: “I’m interested in the presence of the hand, the mistakes, the paint that sometimes runs. In the end,” she says, “it goes where it wants.” An invitation to realize that the limit expands.

Gisela Gueiros
August, 2022

Original version in Portuguese

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1 Agnes Martin, in Ann Wilson, “Linear Webs”, Art & Artists 1 (October 1966), p. 48.