Walmor Corrêa
April 8th, 2008
This Sunday I attended to the “Os Trópicos” (The Tropics) exhibition in CCBB (link is in Portuguese), here in Rio. It was a wonderful experience.
Swiss Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s installation in the atrium—”Dream of an Office Plant“— is astonishing.
Other pieces that really caught my attention were Walmor Corrêa’s Unheimlich, a set of four paintings of mythological Brazilian characters, painted as if in an anatomy atlas.
Below is Ondina, a kind of tropical mermaid, a nature spirit that lives in rivers, lakes and seas. (Please visit the artist’s website for more pictures—also in Portuguese).
I find this an interesting approach in visualizing data. I mean, it is fictional, but is data nonetheless; the kind of creativity required to imagine and them represent the inner anatomy of a mythological character is quite admirable. It’s what Tolkien does with words, only done with pictures (though in a smaller scale, I’d say).
I think this opens my mind to an infinite number of possibilities in visualization with and art purpose in mind: what’s being visualized does not need to be real, only it’s purpose. And sometimes the aesthetic experiment itself is worth it.
In a less formal and funnier approach, American illustrator Michael Paulus goes bone deep inside cartoon characters:
