Sunset Face
by Pedro De Llano

Sunset Face, the new painting exhibition by Gabriel Lima (São Paulo, 1984) comprises a series of variations on the same image: a human figure – perhaps feminine – looking outwards, its back to the viewer, gazing an abstract landscape in which a celestial body stands out, spherical and solitary, it could very well be the moon, an asteroid or the sun. Next to the figure, below, a face on the foreground looks directly at us, emerging from a seemingly fluid surface, showing and hiding part of its features, as if they were the remains of a Roman mosaic or a spectrum in a wall. This face, also of indeterminate gender, precedes, in the sequence of the pictorial process, the figure facing away from us.
Gabriel Lima mentions this reference to mosaics and to the idea of the palimpsest, as two elements that helped him to develop this series’ concept in 2021. According to the dictionary, a palimpsest is an “ancient writing material that preserves traces of a previous writing which was artificially erased”. In this case, it is not about faded texts, but images like the face looking at us. This investigation started in his showGladly (2018), in the artist run space A Certain Lack of Coherence, in Porto. A dilapidated space, with no care for conservation – one could say it’s almost outdoors – corroded by humidity and bearing the visible marks of the passage of time on its walls, imprinted with the vestiges of its former inhabitants, A Certain Lack… was the inspiration for a first painting where the elements aforementioned were already present (except for the celestial body in the background), and for the subsequent series he has been developing in several variations.
The variations are interesting because they allow Lima not only to better understand that original image and to unfold its potential, but also to give his pictorial project a more homogeneous character. In the series, one of the issues that draws our attention, to which the title of the exhibition, Sunset Face, alludes, is the relationship that these paintings establish with the representation of light and shadow – perhaps the most essential question in the history of painting, both figurative and abstract. If we look closely, we will see that they are all nocturnal images, although the treatment is ambiguous; enough to leave room for doubt. So, perhaps, Lima points out that they could be representations of “a clear night”, like those dawns with a full moon in which the pale reflection of the sun allows us to distinguish shadows, profiles and silhouettes in the dark. In fact, it is during the night that we enjoy looking at the sky the most. Not only to contemplate the stars or perceive the vastness of the universe, but also because it is the only time when the brightness of the day allows it. The night is also, of course, the territory of dreams.
And what is the figure looking up at the sky insistently contemplating, as if hypnotized? Celestial bodies; asteroids in particular. Elements attracted to the Earth by the force of gravity. Ceres, Pallas andVesta, the titles of three paintings, are the names – borrowed from Greco-Roman mythology – of the three largest asteroids. The largest, Ceres, is considered a dwarf planet and is only visible on the darkest nights. From this point of view, the series reminds us of the plot of the filmMelancholia (2011), by Lars von Trier, which deals with the collision of a huge planet with Earth. One of the protagonists, Justine, played by actress Kirsten Dunst, is a woman who suffers from depression. Paradoxically, among all the characters, she is the one who faces the apocalypse more serenely, treating as an aesthetic spectacle: beautiful, sad and inevitable.
Gabriel Lima’s paintings convey a similar feeling. They are romantic and melancholic, and follow in the tradition of the sublime – the grandiose feelings awaken by extreme beauty (the universe, here and now), fueling an ecstasy that transcends the rational. Facing away from us, the self-absorbed figure can be seen, in this sense, as a contemporary echo of the solitary characters in C. D. Friedrich’s paintings, always in contemplation of breathtaking spiritual landscapes.
In the case of Lima, romanticism is a characteristic that derives both from the title – where the ‘sunset’ refers to a gloaming and eschatological poetic tradition, related to the end of time – and from its nocturnal atmosphere and chromatic selection in which emerald green and ultramarine blue predominate over the previous layers of muted warm tones: yellow, ocher, earth, pink and grey. Along with these are some paintings with stronger, warmer and brighter colors – yellow, earth, orange. These tones create a contrast with the previous ones – aquatic, oceanic – but they still represent a scene that could foreshadow the destruction of the planet, perhaps with a more chaotic, fractured, convulsed, metamorphic tone, like that of an earthquake, or the eruption of a volcano like the one that created the archaeological ruins of Pompeii.
These sensations are accentuated in the space that Lima chose to present this series of small-format paintings; a kind of cave, dark and built from stone, which contrasts with the rest of the gallery – an unblemished ‘white cube’. In this space, which, by the way, resembles that of A Certain Lack of Coherence, the viewer is faced with a play of gazes – inward and outward – suggested by the works. We do not know if the face looking at us is the same that faces away – if they make up a kind of double – faced Janus – or if it’s just tattoo on her back, a self-portrait of the artist or even a more abstract and elusive representation that somehow functions like a mirror.
In this series, painting is used as a medium capable of bringing light to where it’s absent, as well as representing a double gravitational force, literal and metaphorical: that of the celestial bodies that attract each other, and the tension generated between the spectator’s perception, the representation and the outside world, between reality and imagination.