Pilita Garcia E.

I have been making pretty straight city scenes from my head for the past couple of years. I like to believe they are similar to what the Internet looks like, with all the individualistic people existing invisibly, unable to observe each other over at the colliding room town, with no walls, piled in more than one direction, compartmentalized.

I have been mak­ing pretty straight city scenes from my head for the past cou­ple of years. I like to believe they are sim­i­lar to what the Inter­net looks like, with all the indi­vid­u­al­is­tic peo­ple exist­ing invis­i­bly, unable to observe each other over at the col­lid­ing room town, with no walls, piled in more than one direc­tion, compartmentalized. These cities are rooted in the image of bar­rios (the poor periph­eries, the mega slums) I have in my head from grow­ing up in Cara­cas. It makes sense infor­mal economies grow caus­ing sim­i­lar shapes, shapes that resist quick uptake, shapes that show cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. I sam­ple frag­ments from media around me, and use an assem­blage process where I decon­struct the mate­r­ial until I am left with image details. There is a big gap between the moment a found image detail affects me by ampli­fi­ca­tion of a recent mem­ory or expe­ri­ence, and the moment where I use it or high­light it. This gap rep­re­sents text. Ratio­nal com­pla­cency. The ideal is to shrink this gap.

In terms of medium, I am dri­ven by the slo-mo expe­ri­ence I get by look­ing at brush­work more so than what I get from look­ing at the com­puter screen. This has to do with small dis­tances, veloc­ity, and the way in which we relate to the world. I believe we relate even when we are in silence. Like when I am cut­ting paper and glu­ing it back together I relate to the world through the edit­ing cri­te­ria I use in select­ing images to cut-construct with, but also, through the mechan­i­cal icy sound of the scis­sors, or my “yema de dedo” (fin­ger­tips) hold­ing a piece of paper; I gen­er­ate a moment, that despite how irrel­e­vant, is exist­ing, and there­fore con­nect­ing with other moments inside my head and also out­side me in what­ever it is that con­sti­tutes other people’s reality.

That moment is my work, as long as I suc­ceed in fig­ur­ing out how to stay long enough on one track before mov­ing to another, to act lin­ear where lin­ear is not: we not only think about more than one thing at the same time but in more than one way. The end result describes a small por­tion of a com­plex web of mean­ing, the say­ing of it, in the shape of a scat­tered and lay­ered con­glom­er­a­tion in growth.

Often­times I paint things that hap­pen later. From the 9th floor I can see a kind of glassy ver­ti­cal abyss in a white sky. It’s just a view over­look­ing a gigan­tic glass build­ing. I can see most of the offices and the peo­ple work­ing in cubi­cles sit­ting at their desks fac­ing com­put­ers. The light is slightly turquoise like water in a pool, or like a Lego rep­re­sen­ta­tion of glass. It’s nice; there is a lot of depth in this view from this win­dow. I can also see the reflec­tion of the glass I directly face, and choose, to go back and forth between the build­ing out there and my paint­ings that lie in tran­si­tion on my table in here.