"Driven to Abstraction" - Tania Alcala and Silvia Valentino Karabashlieva
from the press release
L Street Fine Art
628 L Street
San Diego, CA 92101 at the Omni Hotel
858.254.3031
director@lstreetfineart.com
www.lstreetfineart.com
“Driven to Abstraction”
Exhibition featuring works by Tania Alcala (San Diego Art Prize New Contemporaries 2009) and Silvia Valentino Karbashlieva
Show Dates: November 25, 2009 to Feb 15, 2010
Reception: December 10, 2009 at 8pm - Artist talk begins at 8pm (L Street Fine Art)
After opening celebration for the artists at "The Corner Bar & Restaurant" starting at 9pm
369 10th Avenue (10th and "J")
San Diego, CA 92101
L Street Fine Art Gallery presents a joint exhibition of the works of Tania Alcala and Silvia Valentino Karabashlieva. Alcala’s abstracts are based on her experience as a commercial pilot, while Karabashlieva drives her car to create work with intense attention to details. This spotlight show for Alcala marks the end of her year as a participating artist in SD Art Prize New Contemporaries II. The SD Art Prize New Contemporaries II exhibition was held in the Spring of 09 at Noel Baza Fine Art.
TANIA ALCALA
Tania Alcala’s paintings are about finding the joy of being and freedom within herself. Her work is about experiencing consciousness and awareness with the seduction of color with her brush strokes.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Tania obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Ottawa University in Phoenix, AZ and a Master’s degree in Transformative Arts from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA.
The sense of the ethereal that Tania Alcala discovered in the paintings of many artists like Mark Rothko, Yves Tanguy, and Eduardo Matta inspired her to take up flying. She took to the skies as a commercial pilot to seek the freedom she craved. While aviation offers mobility and a “heavenly” view of the world, the exacting, highly regimented aspects of that profession do not compare to the creative outlet she achieves as an artist.
For Alcala, her passion for painting is the ultimate act of freedom, allowing contradiction, intuition, risk and exhilaration to come into play. Tania’s large atmospheric pieces convey her deeply moving experiences from the skies along with her lifelong fascination with color. These abstract expressionistic works of art have an inner complexity, compellingly and sensuously immersing the viewer in a uniquely personal way.
Her smaller paintings shift your view from her the large to the intimately close up views of the earth. Alcala adds a level of creativity to these small squares of the earth captured in acrylic paint. They can be re-arranged in an unlimited variety of combinations and their contemporary pop playfulness brings us firmly into the present. The resin finish on all Tania’s work is similar in nature to the varnishes used by artists a century ago and acts like a mirror’s reflecting surface, adding another dimension to this very 21st century painter’s work.
Tania Alcala is represented in San Diego by Noel-Baza Fine Art Gallery
www.Noel-Bazafineart.com
619.876-4160
www.taniaalcala.com
SILVIA VALENTINO KARABASHLIEVA
In her project, DRIVE, Silvia Valentino Karabashlieva uses industrial and acrylic paint, graphite powder, pigments, glass beads medium, and rust on rolls of Stonehenge paper to recreate her daily encounters with the road. Virtually unlimited, the lengths of paper allow her to paint linearly, creating extensive, continuous panoramic pieces. Through a fast-paced and spontaneous process, she captures the aesthetics of the daily drive, which inspires her with both its forceful isolation from the rest of her fellow homo sapiens and its peculiar beauty.
Road signs, multi-colored reflective markings, oil stains, cross-walk "zebras", torn tires, melted asphalt, and spilled paint become landscapes that recount the permanence and transience of life. Besides the readily visible and sometimes accidental human activity however, her work shows a condensation of various places, visited and imagined. In these condensations, we glimpse contemplations and pondering, states of disturbance and elation, and spliced space/time continuums. The work also addresses the somewhat debilitating imposition of a very utilitarian invention, the road, on the human psyche and notes the prevalence of human deposits, which are helpful to humans but not always harmless to nature.
The highway as space contains the residue of human intentions and attempts to communicate by means of license plate messages and bumper stickers, road rage, spit gum, cigarette butts, and many other forms of human activity. Karabashlieva’s paintings endeavor to show its unique language, to seize glimpses of the mundane, and to record leftovers of human existence.
"I drive my car. The signs and evidence left by others drive my art," says Silvia Valentino Karabashlieva. You can see more of her work at: www.silviavalentino.com