Solo show at Viloria Blanco Gallery
Maracaibo
2015
Curator and text by: Marisela Chivico
For years, Elizabeth has used the urban landscape as the central theme of her work. Through constant observation of her surroundings she has approached the city from different aspects, perhaps her profession as an architect has provoked this interest.
At the beginning of her career, drawings and stains gave shape to her work, for years the landscape in her designs became sectioned the moment her pieces began to use the digital pixel as a constructive element. Her art and went from paintings to digital compositions.
The medium changed and her instruments evolved, the investigation of the urban landscape continued, but now through photography and video. The artist likes to travel the city and capture various situations that involve motion, she’s attracted by her surroundings and her attention drawn to a wide variety of objects such as: billboard, traffic lights, or the architecture itself.
Cemborain comments that her material comes from her travels through the city, she collects images and video fragments and then reviews them in detail. Later extracting frames in order begin her creations, gathering interlocking patterns of colors, rhythms and lines that emerge, then they are expanded and transformed into a composition that serves as a dialogue with geometric abstraction.
Interlaced frames are the center of her present research, the approach of this detail allows us to see stripes of intense colors, which result in fragments of pure abstraction.
This dialogue with geometric abstraction is a process of constant discovery, which has generated astonishment, so much so that it has led her to reread the great masters of our geometric abstract tradition, Alejandro Otero’s work has marked the peak of her interest.
For this exhibition, she gathered a set of images from her visits to the city of Maracaibo during “Las Veladas de Santa Lucía” where she participated and reminisces a multitude of heartwarming experiences.
The result is a collection of digital prints that are encapsulated in acrylic. They begin with the color compositions of this city, the facades of houses, graffiti and local advertisements. Then they’re transformed into a digital language generated by the computer; finally, they’re morphed into fragments and lines with their own colors from Maracaibo.
One of her works, “Tablones postales”, is based entirely on the postal code of the Barrio de Santa Lucía 4001, generating a sequence that is later translated by the artist in a series of planks painted in acrylic, in a quest to give three-dimensionality to her pieces.
Cemborain reveals that her experience in Maracaibo also gave way to “Tablones en ritmo”, where each chromatic unit is consolidated as a three-dimensional and corporeal element through independent but interconnected parallelepipeds.
Within her selection of works on paper, we find explorations and digital collages that originate from variations within the chromatic scales of the image. Titled “Ritmos sobre ritmos” & “Líneas sobre líneas” (meaning: Rhythms on Rhythms & Lines on Lines)
Even though the objective of the artist is to create randomized instances, the result is always respected and is never intentionally manipulated beyond its creation. Her work continues to be observation, now in more detail to rescue the most interesting compositional areas and then expanding them, but in the process, the machine produces errors, as a product of binary logic and the glitches appears.
These glitches were initially discarded, but after many appearances, they managed to capture the interest of the artist, given the aesthetic richness they contain despite their strange composition. With a collection of them, the artist shows us more diversity in her compositions. This approach unlocks a new way to experiencing Maracaibo from its color and its abstraction.
Marisela Chivico
2015