PICTORICAL GLITCH: An opportunity to move in a multidimensional direction

One’s gaze may be astonished when encountering the work of Paola Estrella; the synapses will find a way—either to recognize something new or to connect with something from the past. In both cases, this is part of the artist’s intent.

When reading Paola’s paintings, one may feel-think (sentipensar) that her work offers a wink to late 19th-century French Impressionism—and it’s not an unfounded connection, as both her painting and that of the Impressionists share a precise relationship with the refraction of light.

Back then, artists were influenced by scientific research on light, the human eye, and color spectra. Today, in Paola’s pieces, we also find the influence of science and technology, as well as an intuitive grasp of the spirit of the time—the Zeitgeist—through the lens of the glitch. This phenomenon, born in computing, is described as the unexpected malfunction of code, graphics, or program design as seen on a screen—whether flat, plasma, or LED—each built on knowledge of how the human eye interacts with gases that emit light through electrical discharge. However, Paola’s approach to painting reaches beyond the principles of the Impressionists—her conceptual framework is broader.

The pieces she presents in her Open Studio, created during her residency at lagos | estudios y residencias, originate from her exploration of the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite—the cause of the mass extinction at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, approximately 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and three-quarters of Earth’s plant and animal species disappeared.

Connecting that time—so distant—with our own is the “small” task Paola’s spirit seeks to manifest through vibration of color, light, immateriality, history, and the concepts of otherness, invisibility, dimensionality, immensity, and the contemporary sense of immediacy we’ve developed through the Web at our fingertips.

Undoubtedly, Paola’s artistic proposal in her Pictorial Glitch is an opportunity to explore and reframe our understanding of existence.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator