Everything here conspires, inspires, aspires to the spectacle. The artist's entire painting is a stage of contrasting shapes and colors, a composition open to restless eyes."
Marcos De Lontra Costa
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Petropolitana, born in 1960, studied Fine Arts at the EBA Escola de Belas da UFRJ, and also holds a degree in Law from the UCP – Catholic University of Petrópolis. He attends several art courses, artists' ateliers and guidance study groups in arts and culture in Brazil and abroad. Isabela Francisco works with paintings of different techniques and formats, with a strong visual impact and, more recently, with sculptures and installations that express feelings of pure emotion. His works are part of important private and public collections in the country and abroad. He participated in exhibitions, shows and fairs in cultural spaces such as the National Historical Museum – Rio; Allarts Gallery – Lisbon; Centro Cultural Justiça Federal – RJ; Centro Cultural Correios; Cultural Space of the STJ and Cláudio Santoro National Theater – Brasília.
He also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Cow Parede – in the streets of Rio; A Cara do Rio – Centro Cultural Correios, in several editions; Lisbon Art – Lisbon; Exhibition UNICEF – Paris and the Vip Lounge Varig at JFK International Airport, among others. For 11 years he had his studio in Ipanema in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In September 2013, he moved to Lisbon, where he intensified his art studies and cultural immersion trips. Back in Rio de Janeiro, he also began to act as curator at the Centro Cultural da Justiça Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
In 2020, he creates, on his YouTube channel, the project “Fazendo Arte por Toda Parte”, where, weekly, he presents short videos guiding artistic development techniques for beginners and opens his new studio in the old center of Rio de Janeiro. Isabela lives and works between Rio and Lisbon, cities where she has studios.
She recently curated the exhibition Invisible Presences at the Centro Cultural Poder Judiciário, which addresses the issue of violence against women.
ENCHANT LANDSCAPE | Nosso Caminho Magazine V.1 N.10 - 2011
Marcus De LontraCosta
“Every landscape is a state of mind”
Fernando Pessoa
There is, between the carioca landscape and the personality of Isabela Francisco, a perfect symbiosis. Rio refuses the straight line, the open and defined form and the spaciousness of space. Its hills project over the sea and the city spreads – and spreads – through these cracks, through this endless succession of folds and cuts. Painting for Isabela Francisco is an instrument of beauty and seduction. It projects itself onto the support, whether beautiful or aluminum, with the ferocity of those who make the landscape their reason for being, their body, their viscera, their desire.
This is the permanent presence of the baroque so well understood and experienced by the artist. Everything here conspires, inspires, aspires to the spectacle. The artist's entire painting is a stage of contrasting shapes and colors, a composition open to restless eyes. As Alfredo Bosi notes, “The classic articulates each part of the set, analyzing and completing its lines, which are its limits: each figure receives a finished plastic treatment. The Baroque goes straight to the heart of the pictorial effect, giving this or that figure all the symbolic (or, often, allegorical) weight, which is the key to the work, therefore deserving greater expressive or ornamental treatment.”
For Isabela Francisco, concept and emotion dialogue and integrate through praxis. For her, art is a permanent exercise in experimentation, and for the necessary transcendence of reality – the essence of art – to occur, a deep knowledge of the technical means that allow the artist to build images of strong impact and visual forcefulness is essential. Therefore, technical knowledge, the broad domain of paints and brushes, never becomes an impediment. On the contrary, the necessary pictorial craft action effectively contributes to the emergence of a universe of colors, shapes and volumes that, when integrated, transcend objective reality and find echo and shelter in the universe of art.
About icons of the Carioca landscape, the artist adds a bold allegory composed of circles and rectangles articulated as a necklace of colorful and vibrant stars. The artist travels through time and
different spaces, visits the baroque and pop art, walks through allegory and constructivism, elaborating a musicality of dissonant notes that, thanks to his talent, end up creating an integral and curious work that allows the restless spectator to discover beautiful relationships between the and the color. In this sense, in a certain Matissian spirit, Isabela is not afraid of kitsch or popular. His painting, sophisticated in its formal composition, incorporates tropicalism, the carnivalesque and seductive aura that symbolizes and synthesizes Rio de Janeiro.
If in traditional canvases the artist seems to understand – within the baroque feeling – the white and empty space as an enemy to be conquered and overcome with the help of voluminous pictorial material and, in most cases, vibrant chromaticism, the strategy differs when Isabela works with metallic supports. The silvery and impersonal surface of the support is intelligently appropriated by the artist, who uses color as a contrasting element while at the same time interfering with incisions that bring her closer to certain technical procedures related to metal engraving. Such actions reveal a sensitive and courageous artist with mastery of her technical means and who, from them, manages to create a diverse and personal repertoire. The Isabela Francisco style does not appear as an imposition; it is the result of a process determined by research and a commitment to experimentation.
At a certain point in the last century, the strategies of the avant-garde seemed to condemn the artist to an eternal and unjust struggle against time. After the time of the Utopias, the contemporary artist finds himself free to resume the directions of his own history. Isabela Francisco works in this new reality: her paintings are beautiful and seductive objects that seek to enchant the tired eyes of the contemporary Being. Here, what is evident is human action, the construction of an enchanted reality, built with paints and brushes, but also, and mainly, with the talent and courage of an artist who believes in the transforming power of art and fulfills, with seriousness and modesty, its role as a transforming agent of the world and our reality.
