From Ichor to Petrichor

Having pushed open the narrow wobbling gate,
I strolled around in the little garden
Gently illuminated by the morning sun
Spangling each flower with a damp flash of light.
The simple arbor: it’s all still here, nothing’s different,
The madly-growing vines, the chairs of cane…
Always making its silver murmur, the fountain,
And the old aspen its perpetual lament.

Paul Verlaine – “After Three Years”

Simple conclusion:  what Teresa Canto Noronha shows is interesting, intelligent, innovative and it is Art. Having set the epilogue, we move to pointing some reflections that will help understand what is exhibited: 
The starting point, undoubtedly, Verlaine's poem, which guides us to a close relationship with Nature, experience that will always be very personal but, as it is shown here, also transmissible.
Let's add some other clues:
Paul Gauguin's huge contribution when he says the work of a man, in this case a woman, is his own explanation witch results form instinct but also from study.
In this case, instinct is undoubtedly congenital and particularly marked by the Azorean origins of the author and the landscapes she always lived in.
The artist says, in fact, that in the course of building the pieces shown here, and it's transformation into a coherent exhibition, there is a before and an after another trip to São Miguel. Namely in terms of the chromatic definition using the various palettes of greens that characterize the island's landscapes.
The proposal is simple: wall sculptures with small insertions of the landscape 'a  vol d’oiseau', in a series of chromatic variations, where the colours of the island, visited and revisited, are the main focus, reminding us of the seasons and taking us to the ambience of Claude Monet, as expressed in the series he painted at Rouen's Cathedral.
And we should quote Gauguin, again, when in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker, written on the 14th of August, 1888, the painter says : «L'art est une abstraction, c'est le moyen de monter vers Dieu en faisant comme notre divin Maître, créer.» ... «Dieu n'appartient pas au savant, au logicien, il est aux poètes, au rêve, il est le symbole de la Beauté, la Beauté même.» 
Teresa Canto Noronha tries to create, or better yet, recreate, what she defines as God's urbanism, expressed in His most perfect creation, Nature.
A nature organized but, immediately transgressed and rebuilt in an absolutely poetic form, that doesn’t allow us to know if what the artist represents really exists or if it is only a dream she had or even if it God's dream, where we are allowed to live.
We can always ask ourselves if what runs trough God's veins, the ichor, is blood or sap? The sap that exhales the wonderful smell of the earth in that luminous moment after the rain, the petrichor.

Paulo Morais-Alexandre

Professor. Regent of the subjects,  “Problems of Contemporary Art' and 'Art History” at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema / Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa.  Doctor in Art History, from Universidade de Coimbra. Investigator at CIAC - Centro de Investigação em Artes e Comunicação,  Escola Superior de Teatro and Cinema/Universidade of Algarve.  Under-president for the Arts at Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa.