Over-watered backgrounds, spots, and watercolor paintings are presented in superposed layers. Dozens of them are presented one over the other, sometimes dialoguing with each other and in other times, emphasizing, as acting with arrogance. This is how the pictorial and reflexive work of Francisca Valenzuela is built and visualized; an artist enthusiastic about the color and the opportunities this element provides to submerge on internal journeys, walks that go around the conscious and the subconscious in work of sensible materialization.
In the work are shown hidden silhouettes, parts of deep layers. There is a dozen of on-process works on parallel hanging on the walls. The color stands out and reclaims its limelight, suspended on the space by monochromatic oasis, moments of spots and controlled palettes. The color tempts her and the shading motivates her to create textures, to glide the spots, to promote the flexibility and versatility of the mixed technique. This is how Francisca is observed on her workshop, in the middle of all this information, a torrent that results from a spontaneous and intuitive work.
Nowadays and for a while, she has been working on the subject of the transitory; the interior, the spot, and the sensible; the fondness for finding in a frame all what it borns inside of herself when she actively faces to the painting, what impregnates her with a fluidity that runs through her hands at the moment of creating, and that results natural, on a daily basis. Hours on her workshop, listening to music and leaving the expression to be the vehicle of what the verbalization many times cannot contain by their complexity.
From those moments or long hours of works results a compound piece; a pictorial work of mixed technique in which the materials as sand, oil painting, acrylic, water, branches and more mixed together and intertwine in a single piece. From the possibilities and the constant experimentation, she is able to create and work the shades. From her come the mixes and possibilities of color over the surface that exhibit her pieces once they are finished.
Among the materials and techniques, what defines your method and art that you practice?
I am an artist of the workshop. I am not conceptual: I don’t think in something and later execute. Intuition is my thing, I think of the works while the ideas go emerging. It all appears from the interiority, in an internal journey of decades, proximate realities, distant. They seem hazardous spots, but they are quite controlled. The palette of colors is also thought and determined.
Where does it come the hurricane of stimulus that is able to evocate your works?
I work with a huge number of layers, thousands of processes. A little bit of dripping like Pollok. I don’t erase the previous traces from each layer. I can start with more wild spots, and then I control them. I want to reflect the number of layers that build the human being. For this, I work with ten frames at a time. To not saturate them, to not leave all the information condensed just in one and to be able to extract the essence.
It would seem that you throw yourself to the abstract, to the spot; but always leaving a hint of an idea…
I don’t believe on the pure and holy abstraction. Is too empty for me, because there is always an evocation, a reality underneath, there are stories. And all the spots are a product of an image’s excuse.
In what moment do the materials come in and how do you accomplish that expressivity?
It is a mixed technique. Usually, on the first layers, I work with watercolor techniques, wall paste, acrylic, latex. I always finish with oil painting; it gives me the transparency that the other materials don’t have. The pigments provide the shades. I work with a dropper in some the lines, the experimentations are endless.
The other me on the art
Francisca is well recognized in the Maria Ayuda Center. She is constantly attending to the center to visit the little girls who were mistreated and after a while, she thought in how to contribute to their lives. This is how she wanted it, thought about it, and did it. “It occurred to me to make portraits of them. I used to paint with them, but I started to make portraits of each one of them and handed to them personally. Then, I let them work with them. I give them materials and the freedom of adding whatever they wanted over the painted images”, tells the artist, in relation to her artistic project with the minors of the center. At first, there were 70 girls, all of them abused and mistreated young girls, that were living ion the center where she was able to provide them, as she explained, the help they needed through the art.
Not only on the pursuit of study and describe the result of the interaction of a portrait with her work, but also to create a route of escape and to contribute was how this project was developed and came, none other than, to the IBRD (international Bank for Reconstruction and Development). “I was called from the IBRD, where they work with female artists, and they discussed the subject of the assaulted woman in the world. We filmed all the process and I got chosen to exhibit. There were 17 women from all around the world and I was the only Latin American one”, explains the artist who also left there two of her pieces, in which the IBRD was interested in to exhibited them on their rooms.
To know more about the work of Francisca Valenzuela, click here.
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