Twisted Paintings

Karla Tobar Abarca’s Twisted Paintings is a site-specific installation that consists on four rolls of transparent PVC, stainless steel wire, LED light, and hooks that incorporate multiple levels of meaning that the artist has been exploring throughout her artistic career. The symbiosis between art and technology is exemplified in her paintings, where she rescues technology and reinvents a pictorial language that is in tune with the sensorial, such as vision and touch. The images used in these suspended works were retrieved from scanned images by the artist and a group of collaborators who walked around the streets of various cities with a scanner in their backpacks. The end result is a number of tactile images created by these mobile scanning devices that the artist reinterpreted into abstract forms using sheets of plastic. Winding and bending these soft malleable panels and adding somber lighting to highlight their material folds, the Twisted Paintings embody the fragmented image realized through the performative and bodily gesture.