Untitled series | Viviane Teixeira

"The research work leading to O bobo e o retrato da rainha menina, A moça de câmara e sua rainha furiosa, & And the kingdom rises (The fool and the portrait of the queen girl, The chamber maid and her furious queen & And the kingdom rises), part of the Untitled series, was initiated in the first half of 2012.

A few references and questions arose after three years of steady work. I was looking for answers that would only come in 2012, when my work underwent a significant poetic and formal shift. 
 
My work moved closer to a fictional universe, a fantasy court where the rituals of the nobility are presented in non-explicit narratives about power plays: the omnipotent woman and the dull man, who was based on Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is an inexpressive man who plays a secondary role. 

A key reference to this series was the Portuguese artist Paula Rego’s retrospective show in São Paulo (2011). After seeing the show, I made the first painting: Auto-retrato ao contrário (Reverse self-portrait). My research has since become ever more intense, bringing new questions into my work and vice versa. 

From 2008 onwards, while working as an art restorer, I had direct access to part of the old collections of the Royal Brazilian Family, at the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Imperial Museum, in Rio de Janeiro. This practice had a strong influence on my work. 

Death, immobility, eroticism, theatre, masks, hierarchies, delicacies, games, desire, power, the feminine and the masculine. An imaginary world built upon a combination of literary and historical stimuli and emotional memories. These issues relate to a vigorous materiality in my work: the color, intended to cause a strange feeling, the identical size of screens, which pay reference to playing cards, the characters and the symbolically charged scenes."

Viviane Teixeira in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)