Lilliam Cuenca Creatures

 

 

The Creatures of Lilliam Cuenca

“Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.”

Gaston Bachelard

To write about the work of Lilliam Cuenca is always a challenge, because it becomes and intense exercise attempting to explain the thousands of meanings of her work. Even with an apparent surface smoothness, there is a strong need to focus on contents. In her work, there is an indisputable beauty, as well as certain roughness of certain objects that compose the surface of her paintings and drawings.

Her expression encloses the simple complexity of the whole,  The abstractionism  in Cuenca’s work  is  like a suspended time of emotions and  feelings, like if between the lines  of her own thought , she contributes in the surface of her artworks  to strengthening the power of reflection, of doubt, of introspection. You cannot escape to an atmosphere that becomes a refuge of narratives that speak to the eyes, a laboratory of work on the journey to the unreachable.

Cuenca’s paintings are not to be seen in a hurry, she has an entire universe to herself that she explores, understands and sections in multiple drawings and paintings, she anticipates constructing pleasant expectations sheltering them from the snares of memory, recombining surfaces, icons and symbols.

This individual exhibition of her work clearly reflects the space that she has conquered, taking the shape of a proposal of method; she brings back a restituted power to the artistic discipline, involving common sense and the physical appeal of things themselves. Her paintings are charged with a sense of mystery. The work as a whole contains the depth of magic, and the maturity of a clear and consistent visual language.

Each drawing and painting in the exhibition are consistent in the carefully filling of the plane with zones of color that create tension between the shapes and hues, charged of memory that accompanies them and, in the isolation of the context of belonging, acquire greater possibilities. The artworks created by Cuenca constitute a meticulously ordered territory in which in which its well-organized context live both a necessary and arbitrary life; a universe of memory, custom and artifice. Cuenca herself is an unexpected hybrid of contemporary ideas informed by an acute sensitivity to the past.

The series of paintings and drawings that constitute the works for the Creatures exhibition are beautiful and subtle, two qualities that seem in little demand today. In Creatures the enigma deepens suggesting something about memory, about the artist past of multiple geographies and her present suggesting ways to find ourselves.  Even with the intensity of each of the works presented by Cuenca, their moving fragility affirms both the dignity and the importance of the artist in our age.

Jorge Luis Gutierrez

Director/ Chief Curator