Mamma
July 2003
Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cms
Excerpt from the book "Retratos" ["Portraits"], final work from the BA Fine Arts course at FAAP:
Some may say that we look for a figure akin to our parents in the people we love. Or perhaps that which our parents failed to be for us.
I decided to portray my mother in the final months of this work. But I wasn't interested in portraying the current person, separated from me by an abyss of three decades. I wouldn't be portraying the person, but rather that state of being: my mother. Sublimated, in my eyes, from any judgement of value regarding gender. I needed to undertake a research, find who that person was when she was my age. Obviously, a three-decade lapse cannot be bridged without leaving traces: times were different then, the country was different. My generation didn't go through a dictatorship. But, in her twenties, she went through similar contingencies to those that I was going through in my twenties. Contingencies of venturing into adulthood. And that is why I revisited the pages of the family albums after Mama's twenties.
What was my mother like?
Mama was the daughter of a couple of theatre actors who eventually divorced. Which obviously rendered her a few problems regarding absent parents and two homes: one with my grandmother in São Paulo, and another with my grandfather in Rio. She used to say that, when she was little, my grandmother would put her to sleep before going out to the theatre and she would sing her the children's rhyme of Tutu Marambá, a stray cat who sat on the rooftop of a house and made it hard for a little girl to fall asleep. And in her child's logic, Mama would think that grandma was Tutu Marambá. Over her first years of learning to speak, she tried calling her mother in that complicated name. But all she could muster was a single sylable: "Ga". Thus, my grandmother's affectionate moniker was born.
The pictures I unearthed from Mama's albums were those of a bashful childhood. Mama stood out from the other girls with her quiet, introverted way. She had her childhood friends, but she wasn't a people person. Nor was she one of those types of women. But then teenage came around and she met plenty of people. Friends she has kept to this day. She went to summer camp, played volley-ball, played a part in one or two theatre plays along with her parents. But theatre wasn't her world. It had given her some good things, but also plenty of traumas. She tried something more solid and precise: architecture. But right on the first semester, she noticed that wasn't it. And then, the discovery: medicine! It was during her residency, slightly older than I am now, at the end of college, that she met my father. They were married while they were still students, and I was born four years after they graduated.
From then on, Mama strongly dedicated herself to research tuberculosis. She would say more people die every year from tuberculosis than they do from AIDS. And it seemed somewhat ironic that I, her son, would dedicate myself to the arts, an area that used to be linked to the disease. She made it far on her career, published articles, made it into the global community of researchers. She filled me with pride for her.
Mama and my art. As the daughter of artists, she had a very refined taste for arts in general. I don't know if it was due to my immaturity or merely a matter of taste, but we constantly differed on the subject. The things she enjoyed often felt tedious to me. And the things that I enjoyed were either incomprehensible, or too banal to draw her attention. I believe the only taste we shared was for dense and somewhat violent movies. The ones that made us dwell on them for days, impressed. Nevertheless, her opinions interested me. Even when they were contrary to my own, even when they abhorred some of my work (expressing it with all of a mother's tenderness...), they were impossible to ignore. I only felt truly satisfied with a piece after it won her approval. From her; from my father, who had little interest in the field; or from my brother, who would belittle anything I did just for kicks.
Amidst the weathered photos, I found some in black and white. They were odd pictures. The face revealed very few details, but enough for me to recognise Mama. Just the shape of a mouth and those eyes. It was enough.
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