Painting images with words or how the author entered the artist’s atelier

Abstract

Rua de Paris em dia de chuva (2020), a novel by Isabel Rio Novo, brings back the figure of Caillebote by fictionalizing — with ingenuity and art — the life of the French painter, aligning it with the changes that occurred in Paris at the end of the century. The interest in the double “biographical-historical” arises from the passion of the Author (narrator-character) whose interest in Caillebote and his paintings drives her to create a novel with the impressionist artist as its protagonist. The mysterious and somber figure of Helena, an academic specializing in art history, also appears in the fictional space. Among the painter, the writer and the researcher, the threads of love that unite them are intertwined. This essay focuses on the narrative with the aim of thinking about relationships with images that go beyond literal representation, highlighting emotional and symbolic strength, based on cultural continuity and the transmission of ideas through images over time. That is, images are not just isolated aesthetic objects, but parts of a “collective memory” that reflect human concerns and desires, through their “survivals”. As theoretical assumptions we will use the concepts of image by Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman.