Carla Arocha

Philippe Pirotte 

The work of Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha is infused with specific ingredients, ranging from patterns, fabrics, fashion or the modern vernacular, to the knowledge of optical illusion and biological reactions. She consciously moves some of these elements back to contaminate the specific practice of making art and the particular historical space of painting where they are displaced. The interferential shifts between the visual, the ocular and the psychological inform works in a variety of mediums but connected through painting. The notion of disorientation can be considered as a key operative element in a lot of Arocha's work. For example in a group of works related to the experience of survivors of a chemical attack (Underground, 2001) the artist re-installed the eclipsing of orientation in the viewer's mind as caused by chemical agents recalling nausea, dizziness, or perpetual night vision. Also in other works investigating harsh blinding light (Snow, 2003) or the effects of combustion (Smoke, 2004) on vision, bodily and mental perception obscure one another.
Next to that in the last couple of years Carla Arocha made an uncompromisingly continuous series of small drawings, in which the initial conveyed sense of availability slips away and gives place to a loss of orientation, because choice is permanently postponed, confronted with what appears as a supposedly endless competing set of indifferent objects. In a rare figurative undertaking like the painting Vanessa (2003), colours deny one another and the depiction breaks open in the field of the optical, undoing the rhetoric of recognizable imagery. But this undoing is, of course, not entirely successful: moving back and forward, features appear at the threshold of unread ability. In a game of hide-and-seek, the concealed child can bear not being seen only for the briefest time.

(2005)