Não são coisas do cotidiano, só parecem

 

Text by Giancarlo Hannud

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Throughout the nearly two decades Eleonore Koch lived in London—from 1968 to 1989, the period to which most of the works gathered here belong—she worked not only as an artist but also as an interpreter and translator for Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police. In interrogation rooms and the hallways of the now-demolished building, acting as a communicative bridge between the accused and the accusers, the investigated and the investigators, she had the chance to witness humanity in all its diversity—an experience that surely enriched her understanding of human nature. The image of the artist about to step into an interrogation room—still empty but heavy with the presence of countless dramas that unfolded there before—seems to be an apt metaphor for the sensitive tensions found in Koch’s work. It provides us with a place from which to briefly view the drawings, studies, and tempera paintings included in this publication.

Despite the frequent emphasis on the silence and stillness of her work by critics and scholars, it seems more accurate to say that her sensibility is best revealed in the anxious tension of her paintings—staged scenes of drama teetering on the edge of unfolding. Entirely devoid of human presence, her compositions nonetheless suggest the possibility of action; there is, within them, a hint of performance.

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It is worth noting that Koch began her investigative-formal process from photographs or visual memories of her intimate world—landscapes, objects, flower arrangements—her “glimpse images,” as she called them. “The painting starts from a real object and the forms repeat, always reworked according to my fantasies.” From this concrete foundation, she obsessively traced, erased, and retraced lines in graphite or crayon on paper, each variation bearing its own personality and tone. Once a basic template was established, she explored new arrangements by adding paper cut-outs, new lines, and other fleeting images. Color was introduced next, investigated in its infinite possibilities—often prompting new rearrangements, insertions, and cuts in a compulsively anguished pursuit of order. Only then did she move on to the canvas itself. In this relentless organization of elements lay her creative act. Even once fixed on canvas, the work wasn’t truly complete—it was more of a temporary resolution, like an unsolved crime; the idea remained open to future reworkings. In the works reproduced here, we can trace for the first time the path of this slow process—from the initial glimpse to the finished painting—making us at once accomplices and hidden observers of her creative system.

 

The unveiling of Koch’s slow process of formal refinement—of gardens, interiors, vases, landscapes, and seascapes—also reveals that she was not an artist primarily concerned with the subject matter itself, but with how it was handled. Her images are scenes of the world, and her themes are merely pretexts for her gaze. In her obsessive urge to organize things, Koch reveals a discomfort with the chaos of human scenography. By channeling her energy into this need for order, she managed to impose structure on a world that, for much of her life, was historically disordered. Unable to control the world itself, Koch chose instead to organize her own subjectivity, using fleeting glimpses of the outside world as her starting point. According to Rosa Cass: “Painting is, above all, her [Koch’s] way of reworking the world—a mode of self-granting.” Perhaps this is why her work never fully yields itself to the viewer; something always remains unknown behind her compositions.

It is clear that the details of the artist’s biography played a crucial role in shaping her visual sensitivity. Born in Berlin in 1926, Koch was the daughter of highly educated parents: her mother, Adelheid Koch, was a psychoanalyst, and her father, Ernest Koch, a lawyer. In 1936, the family fled the horrors of Nazism and found refuge in Brazil. Koch returned to Europe in 1949 to study sculpture in Paris, and three years later, in 1951, went back to Brazil, where she worked in various roles, including as a set designer for the now-defunct TV Tupi.

 

Disheartened by the impossibility of making a living from painting and by the lack of understanding from Brazilian critics, she went into self-exile in 1968 and moved to London, where she began the most refined period of her career. Upon returning to Brazil in 1989, she continued to work, though she never received the recognition she deserved. Known for being difficult and reclusive, Koch actively distanced herself from her peers, becoming increasingly isolated from them and the Brazilian art scene until her death in 2018. These few biographical notes point to solitude and isolation as constant necessities in her life journey—just as the absence of human presence and detachment from the world became hallmarks of her poetics. Isolated and foreign, both from here and from elsewhere, she was severed from her milieu and, like those who lose their hearing or sight in adulthood, sharpened her remaining senses as a compensatory strategy—refining her artistic practice all the more. From this distance, her gaze grew ever sharper. It is this reflective, alert gaze—attuned to distant details and refined through solitude, absence, and return—that defines the singularity of her work.

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To conclude, it may be worth returning to another image, one that Eleonore likely witnessed in her youth: the passage of the German airship Hindenburg over São Paulo in 1936, coinciding with her arrival in Brazil. The commotion caused by the sighting of that airborne behemoth was immense; the event was widely reported in the press and witnessed by nearly all of the city’s inhabitants (then 1.3 million people) from their rooftops and terraces. A giant of German engineering and a key propaganda symbol of the Nazi regime, the airship, when viewed from a distance, became a large, light, high-flying abstract form—both distant and distancing. It serves as an apt metaphor for Eleonore Koch’s oeuvre: the discomfort of her origin lends value to our approach. Distanced from her peers and slowly passing by all who see her work, she remains remote and inaccessible, withdrawn and strange—even as we now glimpse her creative path laid bare.