RJD Gallery | 6/1-6/30 | Romeo, MI

Lightness of Being

Daniela Werneck presents light and lace in a new show at RJD Gallery

On June 1, RJD Gallery will present a new solo show titled Daniela Werneck and the Lightness of Being featuring the work of Werneck, a Brazilian painter who is now based in Texas.

Her work, all done in rich and sumptuous watercolor applied in both wet and dry techniques, features women subjects surrounded by texture, light and lace. The pieces are meant to invoke happiness and peace, and are a direct response to a trying period in Werneck’s life.

Through the Lace, watercolor on Aquabord, 12 x 12”“I went back to my past, to when I was young, to paint things that I like, things that are romantic. My paints are meant to show love within our lives that are often very hard,” Werneck says. “I don’t want to paint heavy or bad things. I want calm and hope and love. And lots of sunlight because the sun and its warmth brings me peace.”

The artist says that even before she starts painting, her subjects bring her joy—the human ones and the objects. Nearly every square inch of her paintings is either fabric or flesh, and each is meticulously painted with astounding detail. Where other artists might see fine lace dresses or curtains and quietly walk backward out of the room, Werneck takes pleasure in the finery of ornate decorations and clothing. Diving into that level of detail gives her comfort. She also gets lost in the process.

Enchanted, watercolor on Aquabord, 8 x 8”

“I limit my palette by working with just four colors, almost like a printer. The colors are blue, and sometimes I’ll change the blue; a yellow; a red; and either a type of grey or brown. Because it’s watercolor, the white is the surface, but I can also bring back the white if I need to in some situations,” she says. “Generally, I paint flat on a table, or sometimes I will hold the painting in my lap. If the painting is larger, I will use an easel. I paint in both wet and dry. The large areas at the beginning get the wet paint and then the final details are dry.”

Serenity, watercolor on Aquabord, 20 x 20”

Other artists might say that watercolor is limiting, but it’s those limits that give Werneck the fuel to paint through the challenges that her paintings pose. She admits that her process has made her very detail oriented. “One of the first dates I went on with my husband, we went to a restaurant and I kept looking at the baseboards because they were catching my eye,” she says. “He had to ask me to pay attention. But details, they are what I notice.”

Golden Reverie, watercolor on Aquabord, 20 x 16”

Echoes of Porcelain, watercolor on Aquabord, 24 x 24"

The sun qualities of her works come from her earlier life in Brazil, she adds. “It’s a very sunny place, and it’s the sun that I need in my life. I need that warmth on my skin,” Werneck says. “I’m the kind of person that when it’s grey outside I’m grey. I need the sun.” Natural sunlight, often shining in from an unseen window, is a recurring theme in nearly every one of her new works.

The show shares a partial title with Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being,which offers a philosophical meditation on the implications of life and its multitude of choices. The book also deals a lot with memory and happiness, and the poetic link that unites (and also divides) them. “The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful,” Kundera wrote. “Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Whispers of Light, watercolor on Aquabord, 16 x 8"

For the gallery, Werneck’s work speaks to this link between memory and happiness. “One can almost feel the warmth of the sun in Daniela Werneck’s luminous watercolors,” says Joi Jackson Perle, RJD’s gallery director. “Her subjects—often young women bathed in sunlight—seem to absorb this radiance much like flora, transforming light into quiet strength, joy and resilience.”

Daniela Werneck and the Lightness of Being will remain on view through June 30 in Romeo, Michigan. —