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AMAZÔNIA IMAGINED


“IT IS AN ARTIST’S DUTY TO SEE BEYOND THEIR EYES”




The Amazonian Indian see beasts such as the jaguar, or the planets tracing paths in the sky, as articulate personalities, as much part of their extended family as tribal siblings.


It is this quality of belonging that Kim Poor seizes, in a magical series of pictures that have already been widely exhibited in her native country. She fuses her work with the legends of Amazonia to become part of them, an inseparable component of the complex Amazonian matrix.

The paradox is that she chooses highly technological means of doing this. An extremely demanding medium - glass and pigment - fused, with ferocious heat, onto steel. Once fired the glass particles cling firmly and produce colours of astonishing depth and translucency.
Kim Poor is looking for a way of finding true, durable equivalents for the colours and textures of the Amazonian rainforests and for the shimmering hues of the creatures that inhabit them.

Light strikes through the surface of painting created with glass powder and is reflected back from the metal ground. This gives Kim Poor’s work its characteristic glow and depth. It changes unpredictably as light strikes from different angles or with varying degrees of intensity.

The bloom of the colour is enhanced by another special characteristic, an absence of outlines. Forms are built from minute speckles of colour; the image has no firm boundaries. Subtle optical variability is one of their chief properties - the spectator’s eye is never quite at rest. One is always in dialogue with an ever-shifting surface. This, the images tell you, is what happens when you look, and hold your breath. The magical moment is yours forever, just as it was for the artist. The work offers an almost frightening sense of permanence, given the recalcitrant materials from which it is made.

The dreamlike quality of Kim Poor’s work does, of course, tend to align itself with things that have often aroused comment both in Latin American art and in Latin American literature. In a broad sense we have here yet another example of Magical Realism that can be found in the work of great contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende. Her work shares with theirs not only a dreamlike atmosphere but an undoubted, though often oblique, narrative thrust and, at the same time, a typically Latin American concern with urgent contemporary problems: in this case the ecological problems that threaten the whole Amazon basin, and the tribal peoples who live there.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Blue Jaguar “I can see”

Yellow Jaguar “Give your eyes to me”
Parrots “Warning from Kanaxiwe”


The River of Blood





Resurrection Wall

Copyright © 2017 Kim Poor, All rights reserved.

All images Copyright © 2017 Kim Poor, All rights reserved.