Graça Ramos is a transgressive artist by nature. By demonstrating her concern with the values of traditional art, she gains strength and expression, in her way of plastically demystifying the human body, decoding what is recognizable in her art-making style. In his canvases, mystery and life, they reveal themselves, involving restlessness and anxiety, through the quest to experience. Her art, initially influenced by the boiling environment of the Northeastern fairs, acquires over the years a refinement of its own, from her travels around the world and her experiences as a woman creator of art. Calazans Neto or MestreCala used to say about Graça Ramos that “the injunction between the artist and the woman is a perfect dialogue where this wonderful creature ‘the woman’ has emerged as a way out of a magical personal world. In 1996 in Spain, he created his first Caixas de Luz, an act that began in 1984, still here in Bahia, tearing and sewing the support on the canvas in an attitude of rebellion, as if he were a craftsman and going further, by transforming a traditionally two-dimensional element into three-dimensional. Thus, according to his words, “it opens windows that allow light to pass through, sometimes filtered through lace, embroidery, burlap or cut bags that let the light leak, sometimes filtered and translucent, painting with colors, establishing a relationship between the internal spaces. external spaces, revealing other dimensions”. His gesture when cutting the canvases, as in LúcioFontana, breaks with a classical structure, modifies the conception of the painting, giving it a sense of spatiality that inserts his work in Contemporary Art. As a result, Gregório Otero theorizes, “The incorporated aspect goes beyond neorealism, as it includes an integration with preponderant plastic languages”. In the concept of Graça (1997) “the work of art is what is recognized as a manifestation of knowledge, it does not need to imitate other objects, scenes or events, therefore, contemporary artistic activity must be interested in creating, inventing and intervening with its own expressiveness” . It is in this sense that she transgresses, awakens to something freer, looser, exploring spaces, concretizing a story, in the face of an art free from prejudice and strongly marked by the perception of the different. Alberto Freire de Carvalho Olivieri (2005) Post-Doctor, researcher and professor of the Masters in Visual Arts at Escola de BelasArtes-EBA/UFBA, argues that “the creative process essentially takes place in the unconscious”. Graça’s unconscious includes interacting with the world by creating a specific language of signs, a visual language of communication where bodies and lights are demystified icons. It configures, deconfigures, establishes a dialogue with the artistic making. In the process of deconfiguration, the artist breaks with the limits of the purely formal to enter the sphere of senses and sensitivities, the field of knowledge in which this artist works. In the new millennium, the personal style of the artist in tune with her time, the spontaneity of a very rich private universe prevails.For Graça Ramos, the work of man is always a reflection of his soul and his spirit, as the Work of Art is a reflection of his creator. Canvases, walls, murals, panels, boxes, paper, cardboard, wood, everything in Graça’s hands becomes art. The art critic Matilde Matos recognizes in Graça also a tireless researcher when she uses “all kinds of material, technique, support, trying to violate the integrity of the plane, making the canvas a patchwork in which the seams are used as natural divisions […] new for the audacity of the composition”. By breaking away from realism, Graça breaks down the anatomical shapes, reinventing her own vocabulary, capable of establishing a dialectic for the simple stimulus of vision. It spreads pictorial masses that vibrate and contrast with spaces that refer to the Baroque, breaking all the ties with the development of a work “right, formal”, seeking to confirm, delimit, demarcate its pictorial space. Significantly, the poetics of his work develops among a multiplicity of images, which populate his imagination in a discourse with contemporary aesthetic content, which takes place in parallel with the transitory and timeless aspect of art.
Jani Sault