Flora Assumpção’sSuíte Azul [ou provérbios azuis] (Blue Suite [or blue proverbs])

Brazilian artist Flora Assumpção brings diverse media and techniques to her practice: drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, architectural installations. For more than 20 years, she has been diving into an art-making process that is deeply curious about the creative and destructive potential of human interaction with the earth. Her works play with scales and passages between worlds, often gesturing toward the fantastical and spectral realms, as in the ongoing series Suíte Azul [ou provérbios azuis] (Blue Suite [or blue proverbs]).

This investigation dates back to early childhood. Assumpção tells me that her mother recalls her absorption with blue hues beginning at age two. Decades later, the fascination evolved into an art practice that invited viewers to immerse themselves in blue through artworks both miniature and monumental. In Suíte Azul, she captures natural elements that open visual clearings for her audience to meditatively inhabit such spaces. Some of the landscapes in the series are photos taken in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. She would wake up hours before sunrise to capture a terrain that has suffered deeply from deforestation—and has also experienced regeneration at the hands of a man committed to rewild­ing that stretch of land, the artist’s own father. Suíte Azul stands as an ode to the power of restoring the land, one seed and one sunrise at a time.

A subtitle for this series—do que não há palavras a dizer, “what there are no words to speak of”—is Assumpção’s play on words and visual activism. “We can’t really claim to be decolonizing and rewilding our imaginations and ways of thinking-being,” she tells me, “if the only way of doing that is through written language that follows a method and a grammar instituted by colonizers. Our visual languages are legitimate ways of sensing and knowing, too.” The compendium of storms and horizons shrouded in mist, clouds, trees, stillness, and many shades of blue are Assumpção’s invitation to sense, notice, and express the unspeakable otherwise.