Beauty. Beauty. Beauty a thousandfold to inevitably describe the series of works by artist Elizabeth Dorazio, who literally plunges into nature in her collages. The visions of her work show the artist sheltered by large leaves, huge flowers, gigantic trunks of the plants and nature’s exuberance. Her photographic collages stem from her symbolic and total intuition of the natural worldview. Landscapes that place humans in the condition of a stranger observing a vegetal and aqueous world. This conjunction represents a true Garden of Eden in both series, “I went on a trip”, from 2020 and 2021 and “On Nature”, from 2019 and 2020.
In the series “I went on a trip” — collages on paper and digital copy —, landscapes that border on phantasmagoria are observed by the artist’s figure itself, strategically placed in each photographic collage. Doubtless a romantic and cosmic sight of forests, woods, rivers, mountains, clouds, sky, light, shadows and fauna. Beautiful visions of the world — that is what the artist gives us. In the images she creates, she clothes herself with human littleness before the grandeur of nature, by placing her minute self within the invented, transfigured and exaggerated landscape, and in some situations the carnivore-looking flowers and plants seem ready to swallow her. The artist stands as a mere observer of the fantastic world of plants.
Humans are nothing more than a cell, an atom or a grain of sand alive in the universe that makes up the Earth. Such romantic thought becomes evident in her landscape collages and in the collage drawings of foliage from the “On Nature” Series. In this series, she is left out of the frame, as is said of a photograph or a painting — as an observer. Transparencies are created on the layers upon layers carefully laid on top of each other. This creates pictorial, translucent, silky and warm layers for the eye. Her collages mix idealism with realism and phantasmagoria (the unimaginable, the invention), mingling human and nature spirituality in her work. A sublime conjunction in art.
Ricardo Resende
Curator Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea