ARTECOLOGIA

ARTECOLOGIA

Born in Holland, she came to Latin America during the sixties and actually lives at the Island of Guarujá near the seaside in the State of São Paulo. During many years a surrealistic designer and painter studied with several known painters (among them Aldo Bonadei and Carlos Jachieri). As an environmental activist she works mainly with rehabilitation of Wildlife and cultural diffusion, She is also a cultural adviser to several environment non-governmental groups,like the APEVI and AMGLO.
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Some years ago, the Cultural Center of Vergueiro in São Paulo invited me to have an exhibition. It was the very first time I had the chance of exhibiting the animals I had started to research, just some time before, not to the limited public of an Art Gallery but to an all kind public consisting of literate and illiterate people, children, teenagers, other artists etc. etc.

However, some time before, I was a surrealictic painter, investigating the I, or naturally the WE, dwelling in the world of dreams, the unreal, which depending on the kind of language used, turns itself real quite easily.Anyhow the search for the reason to be, brought me across the animal, that mysterious entity, unexplainable but infinitely precious.I admit that I didn't find justification for the fact of our being, but after what I found and what I am able to feel to day it doesn't seem so very important to me anymore and without doubt we are.

I always loved our companions, not so very different from us, on this journey of our vessel through the universe. But I never identified so much with them as when I felt the necessity of channeling them through colours, lines and forms. What kind of strange universe I entered. An universe consisting out of smells, of images, of sounds, of hunger, of fright, of mating and of things and feelings I cannot really understand, but which, in one way or another I have to reveal in the only way I know.

Returning to the Cultural Center, where this first exhibition on Animals in Danger of Extintion happened, I had the biggest surprise.The quantity of visitors surpassed the number of 4.000 and among were musicians, painters, schools and organized groups, so many people and all so different, extending the event for one more month. Messages left in the book of precense were surprisingly encouraging.

Encouraging yes, because in our society of immediatism, massified ideals and conducted consumption, where the artist and his specific languages are being ignored ( if not interesting as an investment commodity), it is pleasant to verify that, in some way, we are still able to touch people's innermost, too much dazzled by the neons of keyed-in outdoors of life.

Simone marie, Guarujá 2003.