Statement, Artemisa Gallery 2015

The series I develop in my work allow me to shape, continue and develop my line of thought. Through them, I deepen and explore different aspects that further my search. I chose the path of emotion and intuition to approach my language and meticulously deploy my pictorial grammar. Some of the series, such as The Poem of Shapes, White Series, Strokes Series, Charcoal Series, etc., have allowed me to find richness in austerity and complexity in simplicity.

“The austerity of color in my work helps me expand, since I find endless richness in the smallest of the resources. A simple stroke of charcoal offers me a symphony that satisfies my aesthetical language. Texture and chromatic value themselves give me the perfect excuse to generate my work.”(1)

Today, in Artemisa Gallery, where I present part of the Dialogues series, I aim at consciously incorporating the past, not only of my painting but also, and explicitly, of the values that were the basis of some relevant art movements, such as Fauvism and Constructivism. From the former, I take the emotional relationship achieved with color; from the latter, I reappraise structure as support of and response to color.

In the nineties, my structures derived from figuration; today I develop the structure from a previous place, understanding it as the existential engineering of the universe. We genetically know its laws. Dwelling where structures are in essence and stay away from the appearance of the self is one of my challenges. Once it is reflected on canvas, it is left open to the dialogue the spectator holds with the work.
The concept of improvisation cannot be left aside. Improvisation is a modality that I chose to work with; it is the matrix of my present, a present with no rules a priori, in which I enjoy the benefits of freedom and there is no room for the arbitrary. Natural laws are at our service to emerge to the conscious world, and capturing them in their essence is another of my challenges.
As in the Signs Series, in which the circle generated from a single gesture symbolizes for me “the whole”, in this series, the whole is found in the dialogue held by the sum of the parts. The art of painting is not a risky task, is a kind of work that benefits from freedom and is based on a travelled path that broadens knowledge.

Therefore, Dialogues is a series that includes the previous in order to engage in a dialogue with the new. There is an organic, academic, cultural and spiritual evolution, for dialogue between those parts is the basis for my improvisation.

Transcending the everyday self in order to cultivate the superior self is my goal, the search for a path that has no end, as the kind of painting in which the horizon moves further away the more I conquer; an endless walk that, in my view, tempers the spirit.

Rebeca Mendoza

(1) Strokes Series, Catalogue 2011