“When I was a girl, I fell in love with objects”: oictorial work by Maria Leontina and sensitive geometry

Abstract

Starting from the term “sensitive geometry”, I analyze the pictorial work by Maria Leontina Franco da Costa, choosing the period between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1960s as a time frame. I intend to examine the formal and poetic implications of the permanence of figurative allusions in the artist's work, which nevertheless unfolds in the field of abstraction. For this, I survey paintings from the period mentioned, and I also consider the artist's testimonies regarding her artistic practice. I thus demonstrate how Leontina's aesthetic position points to a problematization of abstraction, insofar as it works with the conciliation - and not the rupture - between abstract and figurative.