Patricia Claro exposes the mysteries of water in Galería Animal
Patricia Claro worked between ten to twelve hours every day since February for her first individual exhibition titled RE-CORTE, which will be inaugurating December 2 at 7:30 pm in Galería Animal. She will be presenting thirteen oil paintings in large format in a room full of sound that will be accompanied by two videos done by the artist. They congregate her particular approach towards landscape which is mediated by the different lenses that intervene in her process. These vary from the capture of the image reflected in the water through photography to the graphical elaboration centered in the contemplative capacity of this mirror of nature.
Patricia Claro “cuts” with a photographic lens a detail of this scene in movement installed in the natural lens of the aquatic surface. She then “re-mediatizes” with digital media. Finally, she puts it on fabric. “The fabric support is replaced by layers of color that are superposed, smoothed and scraped. This is where the image really resides,” she explains. This layer is once again intervened with a new graphic technique that’s done by means of a mask with a meticulous cut-out of the reflection of light over the surface of the water. This finalizes the reconstruction of the initial image.
“This study is centered on what painting itself, as a means of traditional language, has to offer in a plastic proposal that makes use of the digital media and experimental technical manipulations,” explains Patricia Claro, who categorizes herself as a landscaper. “That instant of exploration in front of the natural space acquires a new time in the pictorial process. It is the return strategy which allows us to contemplate once more that mental elaboration which we decode as a landscape.”
According to Patricia Claro… “Everything starts from water. I choose a specific place which I explore and observe at different hours of the day and in different situations. I even intervene in it sometimes, making that way a contrast which gives the movement of the water. This produces an enormous registry of digital photographs. Water, being colorless, transparent and neutral, absorbs everything I need. In other words, it is a synthesis of the landscape. This liquid territory gives me, like a lens, an endless number of images that reveal themselves instant after instant.”
“With a forced frame I register a corner of the water, a wave or a piece that contains that image reflected upon it that shows as much information of the bottom as of the surface where the reflection lays. That first image that the horizontal water screen has given me, and which I later “re-mediatize” through a photographic cut, I intervene and deconstruct it polarizing it with a computer and separating lights and colors after a long process of image selection.”
“Then there is a process of reconstructing once again that detail through manual work. The bottom of the water is reconstructed through various layers until the texture of the fabric is gone and there is now a smooth layer that resembles a mirror which gives it shapes and abstract velatures that I want to rescue from that first image. Emphasizing the duality bottom/surface and shadow/light, the reflection is treated in a way technically opposite to the bottom refracted, making a problem of surface/opacity and contrasts that conform the image. The paradoxical thing is that the shadow is the one that lets me see the information included in that element/mirror and the light is what covers it and draws through its contrast.”
“Here there is no lineal or descriptive drawing, but rather an image given by the light. Water, which makes reference to the landscape and its surrounding, is presented as a totality and as my own way to codify nature. This way it is constituted into a visual synecdoche. It is a detail that can be extended visually by the spectator.”
“It is a very technical and long job where I go building the image that is reconstructed on a scale of 1:1. For that reason, I like to manifest all the labor previous to the materialization of the work. To every cut-out of water I give it what it needs as far as time and procedure, approaching the different possibilities that arise experimenting with each one of them.”
“In the exhibition, the paintings will not only be hung from the walls but also arranged on the ground. This installation makes a special reference to a vertical view, to that horizontal surface that acts like an infinite source of image. It relates to the “how” we see and dominate our territories today through Google Earth or the satellites that surround us. The works will also be accompanied by two videos which will give it a quota of reality, where the reflexive capacity of water is investigated from another visual media.”
