| I have been making pretty straight city scenes from my head for the past couple of years. |  |
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.
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.
