Pinta Sud l ASU 2024 - Limits - Laura Piñeiros

BOUNDARIES

Recent works by LAURA PIÑEIRO

The only good thing about borders are the clandestine crossings.

Manuel Rivas. The Carpenter's Pencil.

Laura Piñeiro (Asunción, 1975) presents her solo exhibition entitled Limits at the Matices Gallery (Asunción), to be inaugurated on August 9th within the Pinta Sud Asunción art circuit. It is a set of recent works: some are pictorial pieces executed in acrylic on canvas; others, woodcut prints on paper. The first and second were worked in large format.

Laura Piñeiro has a degree in Visual Arts and Visual Communication. The artist moves between two universes: art and design; these often converge and intertwine, although at times they also distance themselves, even omitting each other. At the beginning of her career as a student of visual arts, she ventured into Digital Art with black and white photographs addressing themes of a social, global and ecological nature. Later, she took up the engraving workshop with the artist Carlo Spatuzza; there she began to explore techniques using digital media and discovered, through abstraction, organic forms and transparent superimposed colours. She then transferred this language in an analogical way to her works in acrylic paint, in which she works especially in large formats.

In the group of works selected and presented here, there are three significant issues to be analysed. The first: Piñeiro's artistic language, rich in resonances and allusions, fundamentally experiments with colour. It is marked by intense tones, saturated colouring, superimposed organic silhouettes and an interesting play of transparencies and contrasts. Situated in a suggestive flat spatiality, the whole is visually luminous, diaphanous, opaque in some parts.

In her pictorial production, it is colour that allows the artist to construct forms, that replaces depth and perspective, that appears to dissolve the line of the contours. While in her engravings – all monochromatic – the colours are those that highlight the marks and traces of the wood. Here, the contrast of colour itself concretizes a procedure that contributes to providing texture, clarity and dynamism to the composition, which thus gains, through the studied tone applied to the matrix, greater expressive force and elegance, a success that recalls certain Japanese woodcut prints made with the predominance of one colour.

Colour, thanks to its subjective peculiarities, allows the artist to create a wide repertoire of meanings. In some of her pictorial compositions, the thermal attributes of colour stand out (crosses between cold and warm tones); in others, the use of varied contrasts prevails (chiaroscuro effect; complementary, simultaneous, quantitative and qualitative combinations); finally, in specific cases, suggestions of the synaesthetic properties of colour are noted (for example, some fusions could be associated with sound and music). In the woodcuts, on the other hand, colour allows us to perceive the weave of the matrices and the play of configurations and transpositions on the white of the paper, both resources that give vivacity to each piece. Unlike previous works in which she combined matrices in each composition, in this new series of engravings the artist uses a single matrix for each piece; this process of repeating matrices varying in arrangement allows the illusion of movement and predominantly provides cold, almost glassy tones.

The second aspect is related to the fact that Piñeiro's work relates inner experience with a symbolic language expressed in abstract works. Through her moderate and indefinite shapes, open and closed simultaneously, the artist symbolizes inner feelings together with the radiance and elegance of simplicity. In fact, her works are made from a small number of rhetorical elements: color, composition and expression. The repertoire of her forms is also minimal: simple, almost indeterminate organic forms, made with articulations fixed by flat colors; superimposed, in some compositions they even manage to become transparent. She does not seek to offer us conclusive, definitive images, but rather poetic ones, whose composition, coloration, instability and delicacy endow them with expressive charge.

Her woodcut prints are strongly influenced by the large, eloquent colour engravings of Paraguayan artist Edith Jiménez (Asunción, 1918 - Asunción, 2004), a great reference for Piñeiro; while the morphology of her compositions can be associated with some of the renowned abstract works of the European avant-garde, especially certain proposals by Sonia Delaunay (Hradyz'k, Ukraine, 1885 - Paris, France, 1979), also an artist and designer.

The third peculiarity is related to the title of the exhibition: Limits. This term, as the end or border zone of something, can have different meanings according to the area of ​​use: the physical/real, the imaginary; the territories of geometry, physics or mathematics, of love, language, those of art itself, among others. It can be said that, concrete or intangible, limits divide areas differentiated from each other based precisely on the preexistence of demarcations or regions considered limits. Or, on the contrary, it may also happen that, because they are different areas, they end up defining their limits extrinsically.

In the works now on display (engravings and paintings) we can see that Laura Piñeiro has made the exploration, the crossings and the transgression of the limits of engraving and painting the imaginary path of her artistic practice. The dialectical approach unfolds in the confrontation of dual resources: flatness/texture, tension/superposition, showing/hiding, precision/ambiguity; factors that, rather than showing us the limitation or delimitation of the techniques worked on, express a kind of translimitation of the visual codes of painting and engraving.

Piñeiro knows that, due to its borderline nature, art offers a privileged view of the limit. Precisely, one of the notable virtues of art is its endless capacity to cross boundaries, to connect apparently unrelated issues. With her visual approaches, the artist seems to speak to us about the tenuous, almost imperceptible margins of painting and engraving. But also about their incredible potential to peer into purely essential spaces and open them up to the gaze of plural readings.


Alban Martinez Gueyraud

Asuncion, July 2024.