THRESHOLD: Pictorial-Images Toward an Open Reading Amid Deconstruction

To open oneself to the image created through photography and painting, as a strategy for the deReconstruction of both personal and social discourse, is one of the tactics Vanesa García Lembo employed in the creation of the pieces we now present at lagos | estudios y residencias.

Acting as a kind of conceptual, emotional, and aesthetic hinge, the pieces from this most recent body of research are oblique statements in relation to her previous work. For over 20 years, following the traditions of modern painting, Vanesa approached the stretcher and canvas as a Cartesian plane and a universe of knowledge. She has now exhausted those earlier achievements.

In this residency, a new horizon emerged for her—a grounded search for the map of her current investigative purpose in painting and its context, something that had long been present in her deep listening. A voice now articulates her visual and object-based understanding of the present.

Nearly worn out by the patriarchal principles of painting she once so carefully cultivated, she crosses a THRESHOLD in this moment, stepping away from those foundations by removing her earlier paintings from their stretchers, exploiting their flexibility, and intervening with thread, felt, cut-outs, and resin transparencies.

In an apotheotic act of re-embodiment, she performs a kind of kintsugi healing on her past work—perhaps proposing a transPainting, a seed moment toward monstrous germination.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator