Traços do Tempo [Traces of time]
Paola Mendizabal
Curated by Alexandra Ungern and Isabel Villalba
Opening: 10/29
Exhibition period: 11/01 to 11/12/2022
Paola Mendizabal discusses her history and her time. What time and stories would those be? One can relate to the one that amplifies the artist’s life in her successive displacements from one country to another, as a contemporary nomad, where she creates menhirs in the territory where she now lives. The artist of Mexican origin, residing in Brazil, presents at Ateliê Alê a wide range of productions during her stay in this country and with that, she leaves for another adventure in another part of the globe.
Graduated in architecture and having worked in this profession for years, she brings to her production an organized and rigorous composition that establishes connections between some artistic currents such as figuration, geometry and abstraction that accompany the layout and composition within the pictorial space in which she works. In this journey, she is nourished by affections, where the observation of nature plays a fundamental and indispensable role in her production.
The movement of translation that the Earth completes a revolution around the Sun, being responsible for the seasons, is presented in the work entitled Rotación Terrestre, in the next room the seasons of the year are revealed in the paintings where the palette is transformed in them. The movement and marked sliding of the brush and spatula are evident in the various layers produced with acrylic paint.
Paola’s perception allows her to reflect and create gestural paintings with traits that anticipate her future work. Circles, curves and linear lines appear where black is the predominant color, created with a liquid blanket. This demonstrates his detachment from the traditional canons of painting and the importance of experimentation in his research. In the work Página de la Vida, where she uses this material, it is a representation of a page from a notebook, where everyone can imagine their own story. In this way she creates connections between her experiences and those of the viewer.
This exhibition offers the opportunity to appreciate Paola’s most recent works, which establish a dialogue in her life experience and aesthetic production, thus building her own history in the broad artistic universe. We wish Paola much success in her next venture and that she continues to expand these experiments and her repertoire that will be nourished by this experience in other places on this planet.
Isabel Villalba
Alexandra Ungern
