EKLEKTIKOS

By: Francesca Gargallo

Tatitana Montoya insists once and again, “We live in a time of such diversity that I insist on being selective, and therefore, I don’t correspond to any particular art movement”. Thus, this painter, who is at the same time a sculpture, printmaker and ceramist, polishes metal, washing and oxidizing it in order to create strong and bucolic industrial urban images, and natural images to integrate into the exhibition, eklektikos.

The silver and golden elements that are associated with the moon and the sun are also historical and symbolic references to the land of Mexico, where she resides, and to her homeland of Colombia. This woman is passionate about working with metal to which she dedicates herself fully aware of the difficulty to handle them and at the same time managing their different alternatives. To the metals and the ancient alloys and in regards to the Americas, she joins the modernity of the aluminum with the blue pigmentation of Japanese silver. Over all of them, the acids corrode the metal-leaf sheets and the powders which foment with the oxidation, diluting the green colors, ochres, blues, and reds until they achieve to be at the same time ghostly pinks and tectonic iridescent gems caused by the explosive force of the measured act.

“...lover of contemplation, Tatiana Montoya is inevitable abstract. She adopts a diversity of geometry, starting with the square, the rectangle and the circle which pass through the repeative shapes of the gold and silver sheets, until the balance of the full image, always in the search of a symmetry which can be broken with the flow of the corrupted mineral, gushing as white as silver. Above all, the light plays with the structure, varying the sensations and the reflections according to what is risked during the night or the day or in the shadows.

Light and material, movement and weight have been maintained throughout the 15 years of work, scarcely changing. In the exhibition, eklektikos the artist has left behind the use of iron sheet metal as the support, substituting it for a light mahogany ramin wood with the intention to surpass the hard and heavy material for an image equally mineral but transportable, organic, mobile.

In her two paintings, Urban Codices, Tatiana Montoya investigates further to achieve the sensation of traffic and anxiety of the big cities. The paintings were born from the contemplative passing of time in the abandoned salt mines of the Humberstone region in Northern Chile. This is a closed place with a strong visual impact, due to the houses of tin that have acquired a fascinating patina that does not hide the history of the exploitation of the people who have lived and worked in order to extract an indispensable material for the manufacturing of arms during the First and Second World War. Thus, exits the codification of the urban, a mixture of graphite and deterioration, achieved by the reactions of the acids and nitrates over aluminum and copper.

At the same time, the figuration of its geological fragments, cut and exposed in horizontal layers where the oxidation of copper becomes pink and the celestial image of the blue turns again to the mineral—warm and linked to the mythological content of the minerals. Those smaller scale paintings do not hide the sensations achieved by the rich pallet obtained through the superimposed and fused techniques of oxidation and the application of metallic powders.

They shine in a luminous way in counter position to the night’s morning dawn light as the sun rises where the metallic elements reflect a light, allowed by the diverse and personal interpretations that also more than involve the spectator. Here there are vertical games of warm and cold times where the sheets of brass-leaf, and gold-leaf silver-leaf, and copper-leaf get detached from the misty oxides, allowing textures of deterioration and of the rising sun, once contained to history, even in the novelty of the dawn, drags the reminder of what has already passed.

Francesca Gargallo (Italy) is a novelist and has a doctorate in Latin American Studies. Also, she is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and is on staff at the Mexico City University.

Author:

Francesca Gargallo