Valeska Soares

Valeska Soares
(Belo Horizonte, MG, 1957) - Sculptor.

Valeska Soares graduated in architecture from the Universidade Santa Úrsula in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. In 1990, she specialized in art history and architecture at PUC/RJ. The following year, she moved to New York, where she completed a master's degree at the Pratt Institute. In 1996, she began her Ph.D. in Fine Arts at New York University.

Critical Commentary
Valeska Soares works with various forms of art, including sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, and video. According to art critic Adriano Pedrosa, her work encompasses a complex repertoire of themes, often exploring opposing concepts such as pleasure and pain, beauty and cruelty, memory and forgetfulness, completeness and absence. An example of this is her work "Untitled (Preserve)" (1991), where she displays red roses wrapped in white cotton. Over time, the roses decay, acquiring a morbid appearance. Charles Merewether notes that Soares creates a hermetic and mystical universe with strong erotic overtones, where elements like roses can symbolize love, blood, or flowers for the dead.

In "Vanishing Point" (1998), Soares juxtaposes stainless steel tanks, alluding to diagrams of classical gardens, transforming them into perfumed sculptures. The initially seductive scent becomes cloying due to its excess. In a series of photographs and videos exhibited at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in 2002, Soares explores the exhibition space and the history of the building through the manipulation of old films.

Criticism
"In the past five years, Soares has been creating a hermetic and mystical world of erotic power. Her work is shaped by a desire to lose oneself in a world of objects and images, creating a sensory universe of pleasure, pain, desire, and seduction. The works submit to the viewer as having undergone a fall: the body of sacrifice, the beautiful body, the working body, the abject body, the body of pleasure, the obedient body, the resting body. The senses are directed and potentiated by their relations with the object, operating not only a movement of estrangement but also of intoxication, through which the eye finds its pleasure and comfort in the matter turned into flesh, knowledge becomes tactile, and memory becomes sensual. Unknown to us, it is at the edge of these invisible and sensitive borders that we walk daily.

The discreet and subtle objects of Valeska Soares compose a world of secret affinities, semi-revealed to their spectators through a series of discreet gestures. Such a correspondence bears the mark of a proustian mémoire involuntaire. What these objects rescue within themselves is the memory of their own past. 'The look that will find them one day, in the future, will have the lucid image of what they once were. Before' (Lygia Canongia). We rescue between the folds a vestigial meaning always there. In this sense, art produces a relationship of temporality with itself and with the spectator. We enter a dialectic of forgetting and remembering. Incorporating the energies of the erotic and death, Soares's method provokes new forms of sensitive thinking that are in constant mutation, volatile and restless."
Charles Merewether
Merewether, Charles. Into the Void. In: Soares, Valeska. Valeska Soares. n.p.

"The delicacies of expression of Valeska Soares also carry us into the universe of sensuality in her photomontages, as in the small woven and hanging pieces from a couple of years ago; as well as impressed us first when we faced the symbolism of the deterioration of ephemeral beauty, in her installations with roses, a series of works on the ravages of time, although here present with a work that more directly reaches the senses of the observer."
Aracy Amaral
Amaral, Aracy. Mirrors and Shadows. In: Mirrors and Shadows. p.18.

Sources:
Text: Blombô research and curation, with the support of artificial intelligence for content writing and structuring.