PAOLA VEGA: THE MYSTERY OF PAINTING
By Patrick Frank
In recent years, several Latin American artists have expanded the boundaries of their media. Some of their strategies include painting on huge, curved canvases and setting them outdoors; using sculpture groups as installations for specific sites; and defying gravity by suspending structures in space with cords. Argentine painter Paola Vega is also expanding her medium, and her ends and means are unique and ambitious.
She paints abstractly at a scale to engulf and surround the viewer, filling the visual field. The works cover most of the available wall space, immersing us at every turn. Her color choices and paint handling encourage this: Loose patches of color based on sky, clouds, flowers, and trees, float and drift in an indefinite pictorial space, aided by textured brushwork. But the canvases are not chaotic compositions; they show both harmonious colors and stately rhythms, promoting an attitude of...receptivity in the viewer. Paola Vega shows us the Mystery of Painting when we lose ourselves in enchantment, embraced by the works’ suggestive colors and reflective mood.
This is an audacious goal in our driven and precarious world, beset as we are by social forces, environmental crisis, and political uncertainty. But the unstable world only makes her artistic mission more urgent, calling forth a vigorous and unmistakable response. Paola Vega equal to the task, as she has shown in several installations in galleries on three continents. She created this exhibition especially for the walls in this gallery.
She wrote, “The art that I believe in—and art is about belief—is art that comes to us, touches us, and enthralls us: There it is, calling to us with a beating heart.” This exhibition, her first in the Western United States, invites us to immerse ourselves.
Entrada actualizada el el 06 feb de 2024
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