Between three artists

You do not see anything but a void when seeking a common point among the works of Brazilian Cristina Salgado and Regina de Paula, who live in Rio de Janeiro, and the Catalan Encarna Romero. Despite the long friendship between the first two, in their work they use very different languages ​​and subjects that have nothing to do with each other: Regina uses various media and sometimes, drawings investigating physical spaces, while Cristina, on its route between the three-dimensional and two dimensional, deals with various issues around the body. Among the works on paper from Cristina and the images of Encarna, one could almost construct an approximation. Almost. In fact, the works of these three artists are so distinct that present themselves as independent exhibitions in the same event. Among them, we stumble into the void.

However, as soon as these works have been put together, we realized that the void can be a place to finding a connection between them:

Regina is dedicated to investigate the city and its landscape since its passage by Columbia University in New York in the early 90s and explores with special interest what she calls “non-habitable places.” Is the void, or precisely the absence what constitutes, in most cases, the axis of her images produced from these locations. They are spaces of transit or unsuitable for human beings and their projects, as shown in one of the videos in this exhibition.

Drawings made ​​into stamps are the basis of the two-dimensional works of Cristina. Repeated and overlaped, the emptied images of a seated woman and a rider and his horse are used to fill the support surface to overflowing and breaking its boundaries. To the emptiness of the paper and the gallery’s walls, Cristina added the outline of their hollow figures. And in the unique three-dimensional piece that brings to Paradigms, the artist uses once again the void, making a hollow in the “back” of your abstract Naked Girl Seated, to allow us access to its interior.

On a more personal narrative, Encarna approachs directly the absence in his series of serigraphs. The emptied is the narrative itself that leads us from one extreme to another of your sequenced images. Printed on the transparency and delicacy of rice paper, they step by step count the disappearance of characters and the artist’s own history. The fragility of the support embodies the absences that Encarna shows us.

By bringing together the exhibitions Elementary treatise on architecture: Vignola / SSCC de Regina de Paula, Tremor and Permutations of Cristina Salgado and Self-portrait – regressions I of Encarna Romero, Paradigmas has invited the curators Gloria Fernandez and Victor Ramirez to try to build lexicons among the works of these artists. In response, together they set out to build a map that will help us all to find other “stumbles” in the path between these three poetical narratives.