Signature Art Gallery is pleased to present alFresco, a solo exhibition by the artist Odalis Valdivieso.
In alfresco, Odalis Valdivieso examines the subject matter that has been a recurring element in her previous work. In this most Barbizonian effort, Valdivieso drops the French box easel, grabs the camera, and confronts the viewer with the so called “natural landscape” of Miami. We live in a city that has been partly built on a drained ecosystem, that complex and majestic river of grass has been replaced with a more controlled and predictable network of man-made scenarios. Through photography, drawing and video, this show captures reality “en plein air” and invites us to challenge the validity of what we know as natural spaces.
Opening reception
November 10, 2007
7 pm
Miami is a very illuminated city; the sea that surrounds it and invades it plus the intense and wonderful clouds that always observe it make of her a shining metropolis of sober refraction. If one can cross it in a sunny day you can see that the bodies of construction are so white and of such pastel colors that the sun fades them only to charge them once again of its intense luminescence. If one of the Impressionists could travel in the time machine they would surely look for their easel to paint these beautiful landscapes, that which are so polished and fictional, they represent spaces that appear to be unreal like conspicuous areas of a clearly representative order. Surely the Impressionists would marvel themselves at the light - very different from their countries of origin and would try to obtain with their paintings that representational bond that tied the landscape, urban or rural, with the act to construct an image that, being art work, could give account of its visions on reality.
“Alfresco” is like an ironic act with respect to the impressions history; no matter how hard the artist has communicated - in time? - With the artists that preceded her, their landscaping visions stop in an act, which in its voyeuristic genesis photographs, video) interrupts the city’s daily moment. To observe certain spaces of intense perfection of Miami conspires with the idea of a lasting and forceful fictional stage.
What does that brutal beauty of the city that appears like perfect mean…? How do lives in those spaces pass…? Those super
experiences occur without that wonderful perfection which the artist alludes to; that and just that is what makes “Alfresco” a mare categorical invention of the author.
- Marcela Röemer