Isolda Hermes Da Fonseca

(Rio de Janeiro 1924 – 2004)

In search of beauty

Schilderijen, tekenngen en portretten. 

Isolda Hermes da Fonseca behoort tot de meer bekende Braziliaanse kunstenaars uit de tweede helft van de 20ste eeuw. Niet in het minst omdat ze, beïnvloed door de thematiek en de kunst uit de Italiaanse Renaissance (Firenze) en de Preraffaëlieten, vooral in Italië furore maakte. Haar werk, met sterk koloriet, ademt zowel gedrevenheid en gestrengheid als een romantische en mystieke sensibiliteit. Ze combineert een sierlijke tekenkunst met een krachtige expressiviteit die vooral in haar portretkunst tot uiting komt. Het gracieuze, het zoeken naar schoonheid is de meest in het oog springende kwaliteit van haar werk.  

Méér gegevens over Isolda Hermes da Fonseca vindt u hierbij in de Engelstalige tekst geschreven door haar dochter, kunstenares Geraldine Hermes da Fonseca Chapman (kunstenaarsnaam: van Chapman) na het overlijden van haar moeder en in het overzicht van haar tentoonstellingen, prijzen en publicaties met en over haar.

About Isolda Hermes da Fonseca

Written by Geraldine van Chapman

Isolda was like a creative fire. She can turn anything negative into positive, someone said about her.

She’s honoured by many as one of the best painters of Brazil and known as a friend of the powerful and the humble.

The name given to Isolda is perhaps inspired by the heart breaking music of Wagner, on the drama of ‘Tristan and Isolda’, a passionate, prohibited love and a romantic death, similar to Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a symbol of love’s victory over  all obstacles and all world’s conventions and finally over death itself.

Indeed a mystical, poetic, romantic and a heroic music is made visible in the works of Isolda. Particularly in the decisive force and delicacy of her drawings, some of which were first presented in the exhibition in her honour ‘Isolda. Mestra da Madrepérola’ (‘The master of the Mother Pearl’) in Rio in 2005, after her death,  and which are now presented in Belgium, in the Gallery Man & Nature,  in Sint-Martens-Latem as ‘In search of Beauty’.

Isolda’s work combines the longing, the vigour, the lust for life and sense for mysticism of her Brazilian native humble origins (from the region of the Amazon river Pará) and the passion and adventure of Spanish conquistadores from her mother’s side, with the military discipline and power of  the family of her father, and of her great uncle, the first president of Brazil, the historical figure Deodoro Hermes da Fonseca, who helped to create the Republic in Brazil, and her grand father, a later president of the Republic.

Isolda Hermes da Fonseca was born in 7 April of 1924 in the presidential palace of the Catete, in Rio de Janeiro, and spent her early years as a child in a tropical and picturesque island called Paquetá in the Bay of Guanabara. There she grew up in an elegant aristocratic family, in an atmosphere that became source of much of her reminiscences and inspiration.

Youngest sister of three brothers in the home of strong military commanders, though accepting to be protected and pampered by them, Isolda never allowed herself to be left behind.

guerra-dos-Anjos

Isolda made her studies in Washington in the Corcoran school of Art, where she met the American painter Grover Chapman, who she married and with whom she continued her studies in Florence. The couple have lived from their Art and bringing up their two children, Geraldine and Paula, in their ateliers and Art milieu.

Grover Chapman, with whom she married, has become famous for his illustrations of the book about the ‘Guerra dos Canudos’  (CHAPMAN, Grover.O episódio de Canudos de Euclides da Cunha.Rio de Janeiro, Salamandra. 1978), his many paintings inspired in the Brazilian folklore and the several murals he painted in Brazil.

Paula, the youngest daughter of Grover and Isolda, born in Florence, is a psychologist, founder of the therapy centres Namasté in Brazil.

Geraldine van Chapman, nature painter and spiritual philosopher, born in New York, is one of the collaborators and guest artists of the Gallery Man & Nature.

As an enthusiastic lover of Music, Art, Poetry, Science  and even Science fiction, Isolda  united in her work her own heroes of history and mythology, honouring of the achievements of the human spirit, from the Greek ideal to the Renaissance and Humanism up to the 21th century.

Her international career was brilliant, with innumerable exhibitions, prizes worldwide and important publications in her name as the illustrations of a book of the sonnets of Shakespeare, the illustrations of the life of Francis of Assisi, the Stations of the Cross for a church in the salt lake city of Araruama in the State of Rio de Janeiro.

Though occasionally her passion was devastating as well as charming and assertive: she combined these masculine and feminine qualities in a powerful creative force in herself and in her art, mostly gladdening all around her. Her sense of humour was unbeatable. Not even her own suffering at the end of her life could beat it.

Isolda left her body in her atelier in Rio on the 26th September 2004. Known by all for her intelligent and surprising spontaneity, her generosity and joy of living, the great Brazilian Isolda was brave to her last moments on the Earth.

The spirit of Isolda, as her powerful art goes on living forever, in search of the real face of the angels, the face of love, the source of all beauty. “The face is the great landscape”, Isolda used to say.

Openingsuren galerie: donderdag-, vrijdag-, zaterdag- en zondagnamiddag van 14:00 tot en met 18:00 uur en op afspraak.