For the show I hope to win that ball, by Mariana López, 2004
Since the beginning, I have worked with a variety of sources and realities and the relations between them.
At the beginning, this was manifest in three ways: installation strategies that entailed hanging many paintings such that they interacted. More than compose, I aimed to fragment any single painting by placing it in close proximity with others.
Second, within paintings that depicted a seemingly mimetic scene, I would put elements that subtly interrogated the integrity of that reality. For example, a detail in the decoration of a home that seems misplaced, or figures who may or may not be posing. Third, the scenes themselves often give rise to the question “why did she decide to paint this?” The moments they capture might be banal and might be dramatic, and the painting never lets you know which.
More recently, I have been creating what I would call chaotic yet tightly controlled universes. I am interested in collapsing differences between historical periods and media. In my paintings, it is often hard to say where different images come from.
Are they movie posters, magazines, other paintings? Similarly, historical moments are juxtaposed and even superimposed to create confusion about the nature of history.
Ironically, I effect this splintering by means of the traditional acts of collage-making and composition. In fact, I do put pieces of things together in a canvas, but the aim and, I hope, result is a radical splintering of any possible whole.
