Wilma Martins: territórios interiores

Wilma Martins Invites In

Sunday afternoon, siesta hour, the house lies in silence. The young woman wakes before her husband and decides to brew some coffee. While the water heats, she lights a cigarette and reaches for a hairbrush to smooth the strands tousled by sleep. When her gaze falls on the dressing table, a jolt: tiny alligators emerge from the magazine she had left there, ready to scatter across the room. On the page, it reads: “Generally not aggressive, the alligator keeps the waterways of the American swamps open. The average length is 3 meters.” Her astonishment deepens as, against the vivid, colored hide of the creatures, she notices the house around her drained of gray. What she knows fades; what she does not understand gleams. Only the beasts have color.

This is how I like to look at the works in Cotidiano [Everyday Life], a series by artist Wilma Martins (1934–2022): imagining the story that surrounds each scene, wondering which predictable course of daily routine was diverted by an encounter with unexpected visitors. Developed over ten years, from 1974 to 1984, in drawings, paintings, and lithographs, Cotidiano marked the expansion of Martins’s practice beyond woodcut xylography—the technique through which she had first entered the art scene with her debut solo exhibition in 1960. Over the decade she devoted to Cotidiano, Martins established herself as an original artist who, though averse to cliques, carved out her place opening nearly one solo exhibition a year between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, winning the painting prize at the Panorama de Arte Atual Brasileira (1976), and taking part in the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978 with five drawings from the series.

After a hiatus of nearly thirty years without a solo exhibition, the Cotidiano series was brought back into view through the retrospective Cotidiano e sonho [Everyday Life and Dream], presented in 2013 at the Paço Imperial (Rio de Janeiro) and in 2014 at the Centro Cultural do Minas Tênis Clube (Belo Horizonte), curated by her husband, Frederico Morais. Since then, her work has attracted renewed interest—appearing at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016); featured in major group exhibitions such as Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017–2018); documented in a monographic volume with essays by Tania Rivera and Frederico Morais (2015); and honored with a posthumous solo show at the Paço Imperial in 2023. The exhibition Wilma Martins: territórios interiores [Wilma Martins: Inner Territories], now presented by Galatea, seeks to contribute to this ongoing rediscovery of the artis —a rare opportunity to see so many works from the Cotidiano series gathered in a single exhibition.

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Wilma Martins’s sensitivity to natural landscapes and animals is often traced back to her childhood on the rural outskirts of Belo Horizonte. From that period also came her delight in drawing, which she refined as a student at the Escola do Parque, now called the Escola Guignard, in honor of one of her teachers, the painter Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962). Another point often highlighted as important in her formation is her love of reading, likewise nurtured since childhood. These factors—growing up close to nature and cultivating a taste for drawing and for reading—seem to have provided the solid foundation on which Wilma’s entire body of work was built, and from which rose her ability to see, to draw near to, and to weave stories about the world.  It is no coincidence that, alongside her own artistic production, she also worked as an illustrator of children’s books by authors such as Ana Maria Machado. Frederico Morais, in his text “Retrato–autorretrato da artista” [Portrait–Self-Portrait of the Artist], comments precisely on the correspondence between what Wilma created in these two spheres of activity:

“Enduring thematic, formal, and technical constants appear both in her paintings and drawings and in her children’s book illustrations. The recurring presence of animals and abundant nature in domestic interiors. Large white areas and graphite-only lines shaping objects and situations; the real traced in lines over white grounds; the imaginary in colors and/or in colored washes.”[1]

When reflecting on how closeness to nature and the habit of reading can offer an individual — especially a child — an expansion of their universe and the ability to find meaning and poetry in things, I think of anthropologist Michèle Petit and her book Nous sommes des animaux poétiques: l'art, les livres et la beauté par temps de crise [We Are Poetic Animals: Art, Books, and Beauty in Times of Crisis] (2023). In it, she explores how books and works of art help us navigate moments of crisis and even “transfigure hell.” In the chapter Ces paysages dont nous sommes faits [Those Landscapes of Which We Are Made], she reflects on what she terms a kind of “psychic need to compose landscapes” that we seem to possess and nurture through our engagement with art and literature. She writes:

“The soul is an insatiable predator of landscapes that feed the unconscious,” writes Claude Burgelin. One need only observe how young children feel compelled to draw not just a house, but also, around it, trees, a garden, animals, a path, clouds, the sun, as if sensing a psychic need to compose a landscape, a space whose elements form a whole.”[2]

As we stand before the paintings, drawings, and lithographs of the Cotidiano series, it is as if we were watching this mechanism begins to take shape in the cracks of the outside world that Wilma opens into the interior of the home, freeing the domestic sphere—which so often, especially for women, can be a kind of prison or hell—from its isolation by making space for what comes from elsewhere.

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The power of fabulation and transfiguration, so keenly sharpened in Wilma Martins, finds brilliant form in the Cotidiano series. In it, disorder comes to settle into the predictability of routine, producing a poetic loosening capable of opening fissures of mystery and invention within a universe that can be unbearably banal. These fissures take hold through a play of contrasts in color and scale: there is a curious disproportion between the depicted objects, furniture, and rooms, and the animals and intrusions of nature. A lighter and a pack of cigarettes appear enormous beside the alligator; grazing goats, shrubs, and a stream fit neatly inside a drawer. Suddenly, the intruders — of supposedly untamable origin — seem gentler than the elements of the domestic sphere, which, magnified, oppress these small signs of freedom with their tedious gray.

In a 1976 interview with Folha de São Paulo, when asked about her “role as a woman artist” and whether there was “a specifically feminine dimension” in her work, Wilma Martins replied:

“Although I do not gladly accept this male/female division, I cannot deny that the difference exists and that it shapes my way of seeing. The tasks imposed on me greatly influence my work. A man would not see objects and the home as I sometimes do. Enemies from which I try to escape by inventing oceans in kitchen sinks and washing machines, elephants in vases beside an irksome telephone, and so on.”[3]

In her account, Wilma makes clear the existence of tasks imposed on women within the domestic sphere. This close engagement with the minutiae of the home, in turn, shapes the feminine gaze, unveiling perspectives not shared from a masculine standpoint. There is, moreover, an interesting ambiguity in the sentence “A man would not see objects and the home as I sometimes do”—is he unable to see the gray, or, in truth, even less able to see the color?

In the chapter “The Married Woman” of The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir observes that, within the seclusion of the home— often the only domain over which a woman might exercise some degree of authority—the incursions of the outside world and the workings of time could be perceived as threats to her illusion of control (frequently expressed in an obsession with cleanliness), ultimately narrowing her experience of the world even further: “Washing, ironing, sweeping, uncovering the specks of dust hidden beneath the night of cupboards is to turn away from life yet keep death at bay: for in a single movement time both creates and destroys, and the housewife perceives only its negative aspect (…). A sad fate indeed to be doomed to fend off an enemy again and again instead of turning toward positive aims: more often than not, the housewife bears it with anger.”[4] In Wilma’s case, however, the enemies are neither time nor outside agents; on the contrary, they are what help her face the dishes in the sink and the clothes awaiting the wash. The fanciful intrusions in Cotidiano thus stands in contrast to the bleak destiny Beauvoir analyzed: they were Wilma’s way of embracing life.

            When reflecting on these small signs of freedom that form the core of the works in Cotidiano, one cannot overlook the political backdrop that pervaded the entire span of the series. With the end of the so‑called economic miracle and the collapse of a key pillar of the military regime’s propaganda, Brazil entered the slow and uneven process of political opening—one that stretched over many years, from 1974, under the government of Geisel, to 1988, with the promulgation of the new Constitution. It was fourteen years of advances and setbacks, still marked by repression and death, as well as negotiations that seemed more aligned with the dictators than with the long‑awaited democracy. How could one not think that, in rising up against “the dictatorship of the everyday life,”[5] Wilma Martins was also, subtly and poetically, resisting the tyranny imposed on an entire country?

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In sharing news of her home and its unexpected visitors, Wilma shapes a vision that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, creating a universe in which the inside and the outside intertwine. In this endeavor, the artist explores—through the contrast between white/gray and color—the construction of zones of greater or lesser dramatic tension, guiding our gaze toward the core of the scene, which only later begins to reveal its surroundings. As in the process of making a collage, animals and elements of nature stand out like stickers against the canvas and the paper. Between the delicately built volumes and contours of the painting and the fine, precise lines of the drawing, Wilma builds an inexplicable delicacy.

 For the wild creatures do not threaten — they breathe fresh air into the house. The sink is not merely about the dirty dishes; it welcomes the water. Suddenly, all this poetic astuteness seeps into us, and we cannot stop building bridges between the inside and the outside, spinning tales around the scene. The power each work in the Cotidiano series has to stir the imagination is striking. Standing before this, I like to imagine that the poet from Minas Gerais, Ana Martins Marques, when writing the first section of her book Da arte das armadilhas [On the Art of Traps], entitled Interiores [Interiors], had Wilma in mind — understanding her with sophistication, and capturing her invitation to the world:

FAUCET

Whoever turns on the faucet
invites in
the lake
the river
the sea[6]

FERNANDA MORSE is a Researcher and Curator at Galatea.