Leyla Cárdenas
Indagaciones cronotópicas
The leitmotiv of the artistic career of the Colombian artist Leyla Cárdenas rests in a series of sculptural works that, taking the physical quality of the space as a benchmark, seek to investigate the layers that constitute and build the things and the places.
Thanks to the use of found objects and spaces that accumulates layers of information, the artist success encapsulating the particularities of each space. The apparent superficial layer of each studied object transforms in a depth path to explore and discover at every step the crossing of different experiences of time (the historical, material, daily time and, maybe, a more existential and psychological time that is more linked with the duration of the experience).
Galería Max Estrella is pleased to present the new exhibition of Leyla Cárdenas in which, assuming an archaeological point of view, reconstructs the context linking fragmentary findings of the reality with the stratigraphic location that is enclosed with them. The exhibition space transforms, hence, in an operational field, in which the artist develops some of her working methodologies for presenting the contemporaneity of the non-contemporary.
The gesture is sculptural, but instead of creating any object it uses destruction as a way of construction, letting an interaction between particular places and all its confluences and dimensions happen. In this light, the materials are palimpsests, sediments whose strata are barely perceptible due to the mixture that condense them, and the fragments recovered by the artist, mere documents in which the present, the past and the future are stored.
For her recent artworks, she normally takes as starting point pictures of urban buildings taken in the instant previous to its disappearance, with the purpose not only to reveal the spectrum of time, but also to make it present in order to look into its sediments. Her work with pictures of ruins reflects, at the same time, about the “ruin of the image” or the image’s incapacity to show or represent the meaning that denotes.
This strategy of pushing something to appear, regardless the pace of time, can be seen in another works in which the image of an abandoned place has been fragmented and put on rubble. Since the pictures are insufficient documents, Leyla tries to materialize them, project them in the space and speculate on the layers hidden beneath them. The analogy settled between the visible fragment and the void, that missing information, has a correspondence, at the same time, with the role played by the imagination and the myth in the historical narrative; a story that, although has got a façade, is created from the inside to the outside. And, as the artist says: ‘No one is never more awarded of the way in which everything converges but when one digs’.
