Leda Catunda's 'Paisagem Selvagem' at Carpintaria explores saturated tourist landscapes

Leda Catunda's exhibition 'Paisagem Selvagem' runs from August 10 to October 5, 2024, at Carpintaria in Rio de Janeiro. The show features works that incorporate landscape as an organizing element, with skies, horizons, and lakes appearing throughout. These pieces reference tourist destinations saturated with logos, tags, and shopping bags, creating composite and incongruent places. Catunda's practice involves appropriating images and objects, transforming jeans, shopping bags, and t-shirts into painted surfaces. Her works accumulate disparate materials yet achieve visual cohesion through uniform volumetrics and chromatic intensity. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by critic and art professor Carlos Eduardo Riccioppo. Catunda's artistic trajectory shows a development from early collage techniques to a mature formal vocabulary that includes rounded fringes resembling tongues, insect wings, and drops. Her current work operates through silent artistic procedures rather than avant-garde discourse, focusing on formalist and aesthetic excess as a response to the hyper-aestheticization of materials.