"Mulher penteando cabelo" ("Women combing her hair") is an oil painting made in the occasion of the solo show "Noites de Cetim ("Satin Nights"), by Paula Siebra, at Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, 2022). The image depicts a young woman soflty passing a comb through her hair, while her face looks away, in an act of wandering; her fingers unite the hair together, in a caring and strangely familiar manner. The power of this image seems to remain in the very banality of the act – an everyday habit –, that is still able to carry a gasp of mistery and magic: the comb seems to plow her hair as if it were a sort of heavy fabric that has been loomed. Her figure takes us back to Brazilian, and more broadly, South-American modernist painting, in which the figures seems to be performing as totems, as a sort of timeless image.
