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6/4/2006

Carla Arocha

Kunsthalle Bern, Bern

Dirt

Carla Arocha's artistic investigation can be defined as a critical reflection on the ways of differentiating (between) seeing and looking, postulated as a visual discourse on modern constructions of the gaze. Thus the exhibition is proposed as a double journey into the visual: to experience the different "gaze" spaces that the work constructs and the different moments of its visual development. In her work, several ways of conceiving the beholder's space can be recognized. The relationship between reflection, transparency and opaqueness are three ways of constructing the gaze that are being examined. Arocha explores them in a diversity of approaches. From repulsion to greed, from curiosity to indifference, or from intolerance to correctness, her body of work is a meticulous study of the powers of the gaze.

This artist of Venezuelan origin (1961, Caracas Venezuela), formed first as biologist and then as artist in Chicago, has been visibly influenced by the abstract - constructivist tradition prevailing in both Chicago and Venezuela since the post-war period. Although the influences of modernist movements like Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus in Venezuela and Chicago are very different, Arocha's work is a case study since it is a critical assessment of both contexts. Her work re-articulates these traditions, as far as it is part of the ongoing artistic revision of the ways in which modernity and modernism have been assimilated in our times. Her concern is not strictly with art, but with visual culture as a whole.

From the start, the artist alludes in a very direct and critical way to the possibilities of continuity and validity of the modernist experience, and in particular to a tradition of abstraction. Instead of pursuing the path of abstraction as it has been canonized in art history, her work draws upon the way in which this tradition has been assimilated in the widest context of culture. Infused with specific ingredients ranging from patterns, fabrics, fashion or the modern vernacular, her work moves to the knowledge of optical illusion and biological reactions, only to return and contaminate the sphere of art and the particular historical space of painting where it is displaced.

The apparent formal harmlessness of the work leads us astray and informs us about ourselves - uninvited. The notion of visual disorientation can be considered as a key operative element throughout Arocha's work. For example, the artist mimics the effects of harsh blinding light or visual combustion, which provoke bodily and mental perception to obscure one another. In another group of works she re-installs the eclipsing of orientation in the viewer's mind as caused by chemical agents recalling nausea, dizziness, and perpetual night vision. In a rare figurative undertaking like the portrait of a child, Vanessa (2003), colors deny one another and the depiction breaks open in the field of the optical, undoing the rhetoric of recognizable imagery. But this undoing is, of course, not entirely successful: moving back and forth, features appear at the threshold of unreadability. In a game of hide-and-seek, the concealed child bears 'not being seen' only for the briefest time.

The interferential shifts between the visual, the optical and the psychological inform works in a variety of media but connect in the context of painting. Therefore, the aim of reflection for this artist is imminently pictorial, even though Arocha usually presents her investigations in a diversity of forms. Her work brings out in painting in its most recognizable form but it is also spread out in space, materialized in the shape of drawings, installations and site-specific proposals with a carefully planned display.

This exhibition, co-curated by Jesus Fuenmayor and Philippe Pirotte will be the first institutional solo exhibition of the Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha in Europe, travelling in a more retrospective guise to Latin America. The exhibition will showcase a selection of works produced since 2000 along with pieces especially conceived for the Kunsthalle Bern.
The exhibition will feature a catalogue with texts by Gerrit Vermeiren and Philippe Pirotte.

Opening Reception: April 7th, 6-9 pm

Kunsthalle Bern, Helvetiaplatz 1
3005 Bern, Switzerland

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