Sight Unseen. Viviana Valla

"Intuition is the perception of the invisible, just as perception is the intuition of the visible."

(Nicolás Gómez Dávila)

Viviana Valla's artistic research is based on perception without doubt. She experiments in a hugely different, and more subtle, way from the Kinetic and Op Art of the Sixties. These artistic movements created attractive devices to make the audience aware of the "vision" problem. They underlined the role of knowledge and senses in the interpretation of images.

The time of fruition is rather important in Viviana Valla's work. Her works are not immediately comprehensible, because they are based on a complex stratification mechanism. Through gradual additions and revealing removals, she establishes an elaborate web of relations of signs, structures and substances between the different layers of the image.

This is a glazing process, of course, but here colours, signs and shapes are assembled together with the collage of tissues, post-it, tapes, print-cuts covered by layers of liquid acrylics. The result is clear and obscure at the same time, it does show the final image, a distinctly abstract diagram as a consequence of a complex productive process. Slow perception is necessary. Time becomes an useful tool to avoid easy conclusions and it helps reading the work in the same way we would read any image. It is a combination of more or less organised shapes on a surface. In Viviana Valla's work is present an invisible morphology, which is an essential part of the image. All we do not see, such as the pictorial adjustments and the collage erased by the artist during the stratification process, is not only the skeleton of her work, but is also its own raison d'être. The settled formal subjects partially emerge from the work's surface, they are part of a gradual rearrangement of chaotic elements through continuous additions and exclusions . The result is a painting characterised by micro-relieves rhythmically shaking the surface with slight variegations.

It is not possible to re-trace the sequence of interventions on the canvas. The artist acts in a erratic way, claryfing her project step by step.