Heloisa Novaes - Passwords - Paintings
Born in Brazil in the Minas Gerais region but naturalized French, Heloisa Novaes studied print-making at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris with professors Lucien Coutaud, Bertrand Dorny and Jacques Lagrange.
Whilst in New York in 1976, she was befriended by the illustrator Saul Steinberg who encouraged her to submit her first drawings to the op-ed pages of the New York Times.
Since 1986, numerous poets and writers such as Julio Cortàzar, Mario Pedrosa, Mary McCarthy, Annie Ernaux, Lidia Jorge, Charles Juliet, Alain Jouffroy, or Jacques Lacarrière follow Heloisa's work closely.
From 1998, she has regularly appeared on radio programmes on France Culture produced by Colette Fellous, Renée El-Khaïm-Bollinger and Luc Ponette.
Her paintings can be found in many private and public collections all over the world.
My paintings are not the fruit of great thought, or of a pre-determined concept, indeed no drawing nor study precedes them: no, these paintings come from my deepest most mysterious being, the part of myself I accept without trying to understand. These paintings appear like visitors in my space, in my studio, without prior warning, but visitors who will linger on this earth in painting form. They are messages left by the stars, signs and marks in a never-ending coming and going, a world which I enter without passwords.
Heloisa Novaes 2010