Betty’s drawings are primarily an attempt to fuse memory and invention. Each time we represent a landscape or nature, we bring out the difference between something that exists and something that we perceive. Betty merges that perceived natural landscape into the emotional landscape of her memories through a semantic drift, and its resulting elements are transposed onto a personal cartography, simultaneously pictorial and symbolic.
The landscape is reinvented and opens to each glance its interstitial components, by means of forms that overlap and associate themselves. As Michel Corajoud suggested, “In a landscape, the unity of its parts, their forms, are not as worthy as their outburst; there are no blunt outlines, each surface trembles and organizes itself in such a way that it essentially unfolds into the outside” ¹.
The use of ‘aleatoricism’ springs up recurrently in the artist’s procedures. She works with various techniques such as watercolor, pen, indian ink and acrylic paint. The final drawings are the result of an intuitive gesture always seeking the balance between spontaneity, control and precise observation. In Betty’s landscapes, man’s representation is not necessary: it is already there, as a co-creator of the nature.
Betty Zajdenwerg was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and lived most of her life in Rio de Janeiro. She graduated on Design at PUC-Rio de Janeiro and went to Parque Lage’s Visual Arts School, also in Rio de Janeiro. She currently lives and works in Paris.
1. CORAJOUD, Michel, Le paysage, c’est l’endroit où le ciel et la terre se touchent. La théorie du 1 paysage en France : (1974 - 1994) - Champ Vallon, 2009; translation of the editor.