On November 13, 2001, Galería Elba Benítez will open its second exhibition by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (Rio de Janeiro, 1960).

Milhazes' work is characterized by the Baroque colorist quality of her canvases. At first sight, they seem to state as unequivocal their condition of paintings of organic forms: images of abstracted flowers, branches, leaves, intuited fragments of bodies. But, in every aspect, these works reexamine and denaturalize both the apparently organic nature of what they represent and the rules of the medium in which they are created.

What at a given moment appears to us as an organic form is revealed an instant later as a geometric, as a combination of perfect circles displaced from their own nuclei, as surprisingly straight lines, and, almost at once, as repeated architectural fringes, decorative lace, the beads of some impossible carnivalesque necklaces, which barely a second later will again seem like parts of strange plants or improbable bodies.

Scarcely have we allowed ourselves to be seduced for an instant by the sensual ornamental pleasure flowing from the works, when the swaying between natural and constructed, naturalist and abstract, order and chaos, that they embody strikes back at to settle us into a new experience of uncertainty.

The presence of a feminine quality in Milhazes's work has often been remarked on. There is no doubt that the conventions of the feminine representational discourse are exploited here to build up the system of tensions and oppositions that give form to the work, as are the tensions between what, in both art and life, is considered high or popular.

However, it is precisely the clash among these diverse discourses -between geometry and the order of the traditionally conceived as feminine, between the domestic and its outside, between the body and its adornment, between identity and its disguises- that fashions the density and complexity of these works.

If the abundance of signifying layers, of discursive levels, is characteristic of the forms that appear in these works, its technique literally embodies this trait. Milhazes rebels against the conventional opacity of the canvas, by searching for and giving form to its profiles and colors on a transparent surface. Paint is then detached from that surface and transplanted, in an operation at once surgical and organic, onto the canvas, creating layers, to produce a space of subtle indistinction between the bidimensional and the tridimensional on the picture plane.

The remaining spaces seem to be resolved in a simpler, more conventional manner. But those scratches -those traces of past presences that invite us to think about the age of things, about the passage of time, and that occasionally mark the otherwise unscathed surfaces of some of Milhazes's works- do not even allow us the comfort of settling down on the unproblematic smoothness of the new.

The works of Beatriz Milhazes locate their meaning at the instant where a still-life which is not one turns on itself to become a living abstraction, an abstract landscape, the secret portrait of the inside on the outside of a body, the thin skin that is detached from a body to be set, baroquely, on a canvas.

Milhazes's work has received extensive international projection with shows at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; Projects, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Keemper Museum of Art, Kansas City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Inverleith House, Edinburg. She has also participated at the XXIV International Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil, and at the XI Sydney Biennial, Australia.