Echoes

Instituto de Visión is pleased to present Cristina Camacho's Echoes. This exhibition, which brings together Cristina’s latest works, revolves around noise and emptiness—two seemingly contradictory ideas that coexist in a profound layer of the artist's experience. The pieces introducing Echoes at the gallery are a series of paintings created with her blood, based on sketches found in her mother’s old notebooks. The drawings repeat geometric patterns made with dedication and innocence, which Camacho replicates and corrects. For her, this act symbolizes healing across her female lineage. Various paintings from this series extend throughout the gallery, forming a symbolic and formal stage. This space allows the viewer to experience a realm where a cascade of noise orchestrates the solitude of emotional emptiness. Within Camacho’s universe, this fertile cacophony is the force that generates beauty. Drawing on a recent experience in which thoughts, emotions, and feelings surged within the silence of her personal space, Camacho proposes this exhibition to resonate with the viewer’s unique experience. Each of Camacho's pieces is a leap into the void. Every canvas is altered without a predetermined design or plan. The folds, shadows, and colors emerge organically as echoes of the artist’s emotional voices. Through precise cuts, the surface of the painting is surgically altered to evoke these art pieces, which speak to the deep places where poetry is born—much like a lotus flower emerging from the swamp. In her previous works, Camacho referenced her body on the canvas to explore healing in physical and psychological realms. In this case, the pictorial space acts as an echo that resonates with those who, even briefly, have inhabited the thunderous void. Cristina’s work is a multilayered art, not only because she weaves canvas together to let us see beyond the surface and give voice to the void it conceals, but also because she is attempting to weave together the encounter and dis-encounter of language, power, and reality. The paintings evoke geometrical subtlety and a void that will pull you inside the canvas. Cristina weaves together the primal elements of any image or re-presentation: lines and colors. Cutting the canvas and reshaping it, is what she does. Her art not only makes the canvas a sculptural locus, it unfolds the infinite possibilities of the canvas in its finite materiality. They are not tridimensional canvas, they are the delicate fabric that emerges when we see reality through Cristina’s eyes: there is no inside and outside in these works of art, there is only the footprint that when lines and colors start to collide, we get a glimpse of reality in all its complexity, emptiness, texture and beauty. Her work is not ornamental, it is a gesture of resistance. She cuts the surface of the canvas as a tool for resisting language, to disrupt preconceptions we have around the body, patriarchy, motherhood and painting itself. By doing so, she redefines the pre-established surface of reality designed by a dispossessed language to create an image that paves the way to signify what has not been named. She engages with traditional symbols of the female body, re-presenting them through weaving, and reshaping their meaning in the process. This body of work is an invitation to see what have been hidden from us by ourselves, society, and others. These paintings are a symbol of liberation to regain ownership of what has never been owned.

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