Teresa Poester was born in Bagé, Brazil, in 1954.
She is an artist and professor of visual arts at the Art Institute of the University of Porto Alegre-UFRGS, where she completed her Bachelor in 1982. At the beginning of her career in the 80s, she devoted herself to the postal art, while working on graphic art, theater and film sets, and illustration. From 86 to 89, she studied painting at the Complutense University of Madrid. Between 1998 and 2002, she did a PhD in France on the relationship between landscape drawing and abstraction in Paris 1-Sorbonne. Back in France from 2006 to 2009, she continues her research on drawing and its multiple applications.
In 2012, she created Atelier D43 in Brazil, a group that combines drawing with performance and video. In 2015, she was admitted to do her post – doctorate in France, she obtained an artistic residency for the Atelier D43 group at the Anis Gras space in Arcueil. During the same year, she gave drawing classes at Jules Verne University, at Amiens, Picardy. Currently, she lives between Eragny-sur-Epte and Porto Alegre.
She has made solo exhibitions in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, France and Belgium, obtaining drawing prizes.
The drawing and the different languages and related technologies are at the heart of her work as an artist.
Teresa Poester is one of three artists of “Setting space in Time” group show at Umcebo gallery with La Valise.
I started a long time ago with figurative and allegorical drawings, as a consequence of the dictatorship in Brazil when we spoke through metaphors. Later, in Madrid, the work was transformed into painting through the landscape that gradually leads to abstraction. As a child, I liked to fill diaries with doodles. In recent years I wanted to remake these small obsessive traits and thwart logic by using large formats with tiny gestures. The lines and points are superimposed and function as texture, color fields, and not as contour.
These textures allow me a kind of veil, uniting the different elements, leaving free spaces to give the sensation of another tone. The dimensions of square format papers that do not condition the gaze either in portrait or landscape, often embrace the size of my body. I am not used to drawing the landscape from observation. My work comes from work itself. However the environment influences me unconsciously.
In France, I worked in the old Pissarro atelier in Eragny-sur-Epte. Its dimensions allowed me to increase the size of the supports. Under the influence of the landscape of Vexin, the work became more and more abstract.
Gradually I switched from the stain to the line, following a point in time and space, a more faithful translation of the movement. From this period, the action of drawing becomes protagonist.
More recently, my approach is a drawing combining different languages and contemporary technologies. I draw on printed paper as in the installation series Anagrams, Resonances or Four seasons.
I am looking for the articulation between the line and the pre-existing spot in nature, following a reverse path to the traditional one: instead of transferring the landscape to the paper through the drawing of observation, I photograph the textures of the nature starting from my drawings. This is a superposition of different techniques through layers. They are photographed metal engravings, digitally manipulated, printed and drawn.
In Brazil or France, individually or with two young artists from Atelier D43, I am more systematically exploring a hybrid process. My personal approach is influenced by the collective work and combines more and more drawing, engraving, photo, digital manipulation, book-object, performance and especially video. The drawing opens more to the new supports.
Teresa POESTER