Atlantic Memories


        The history of medicine in colonial Brazil presents a profusion of parallel records, almost never told in medical schools.
        During her research on the first medical treatise written for Brazilian territory, Gabaskallás, also a medical graduate, had access to ancient documents, university theses, as well as books by historians dedicated to these records.
        "A long term garden" and "The remedies forest" depict the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, with the plants, roots, and fruits that gave rise to the original native pharmacopoeia, proposed for the treatment of tropical diseases reported by the colonizers.
        In her studio, Gabaskallás paints large-scale canvases. Her visual vocabulary, which moves between abstraction and figuration, is characterized by immense visual power and a strong conceptual narrative.
        Using overlapping brushstrokes or thick layers of paint, the surface of the canvas becomes a tangle of different angles and depths that capture the complexity of the forest.
This, she imagines, was the first landscape sighted by the navigators who landed on Brazilian soil in 1500.
        Many German, Dutch, and French artists had the difficult task of capturing this exuberant tropical luminosity with their European color palettes.
        For Gabaskallás, the role of painting as a historical repository of time is undeniable, as a desirable bridge between the past and the future. Thus, she proposes a new record of these Brazilian landscapes, with the colors of the 21st century.