“Sound and Motion II”

With an archivist's bent, artist Jeanete Musatti creates works that bring together memories from small objects and images. She produces collages, sculptures and installations. She has exhibited individually and collectively at important institutions such as the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Art Center (Rio de Janeiro), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo), the Bahia Museum of Modern Art (Salvador), the Art Museum of the Americas (Washington), the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center (Havana), the Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte), the Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), the Paço das Artes (São Paulo), and the São Paulo Museum of Art (São Paulo). Her works are in public and private collections such as the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Art (MAR) (Rio de Janeiro), the USP Museum of Contemporary Art (São Paulo), the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, the Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, the João Carlos Figueiredo Ferraz Collection, and the Deutch Bank Collection.

Objects with an artistic intensity attract Jeanete's attention. She collects them in large quantities; they are part of her history, of her comings and goings. They are pieces of the banal and everyday order, but when they are placed in her boxes and sculptures, they gain another status, transforming themselves into artistic objects. As the artist points out, “...a collection of scenes from memory and for memory.”

His souvenir boxes and private museums are made up of a variety of materials, such as stones, buttons, shells, fabric scraps, drawings, and more. These are symbolic compositions that make us reflect on the relationships he proposes in his separate pieces and sets. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the choice of scale that calls for approximation. It is necessary to get closer and get involved with his miniatures.

There are several forms of composition. In “Delicacies of the Soul” (2008), the artist creates scenes with human figures in sweet and subtle actions using threads, like embroidery, on a tangled background in shades of red and orange. In some pieces, there are only threads, but they are disordered and energetic. In “Untitled” (2011), the formation is mainly based on photographic images. There are also figures, creating relief inside the small plastic boxes.

Dance and music are recurring themes in his work, as we can see in " Camarote 7, Grupo Corpo" (2012) and " Para Pina Bausch" (2012). Both feature images of movement and theater settings. The 112 x 112 cm works are composed of several white boxes and create a clear sense of composition that also moves.

As Ricardo Resende states: “Her works are the recreation of her inner world or, to better locate them within one of the categories of art, such “orderings”, deal with what we can call “inner landscapes”, small sublime landscapes that require from the observer a gesture of curvature, an almost reverence to these small windows of her soul and imagination, which open not to the outside world, but rather, to within herself.” 1

1. Source: RESENDE, Ricardo. An exhibition within an exhibition: the world of minimum, by Jeanete Musatti, 2008.