Lina Sinisterra

ARTIST STATEMENT

My installations, paintings and performances of monumental dimensions and abundant colors have been my ruse to keep alive the drive of life, the pleasure principle and the ability to play; in a country dominated by violence and fear, my art proposes a safe place for me. I have been interested in materials that connect with my childhood sensations, such as sweets, cotton candy, gelatin, toys and atomized colors in paint.

The process (my destiny) like that of a personal diary marks my attempt to fill a “broken void” and the struggle to fulfill unattainable dreams. Since I was a girl I learned, the fear of saying what I think, to speak low and to knit quietly.

In response to this, I created an “existentialist working mechanics”, where I play with a visual purpose, with the idea of ailure, of being rejected, or of encompassing the unattainable; paradoxically this mechanics generate satisfaction and certainty in the process: Operations such as sticking 110,000 candies one by one, or knitting point to point a pictorial image, or bottling 14 thousand liters of anilines with a funnel, are roads that I choose as a destination that teaches me to accept the difficulties and to deal with human desires and contradictions (comer del arte quiero). My creative process is intuitive and consists on shaping the materials in a fractal growth, like a children’s game that tries to fill a space…. Which I always see empty.

In my installations I am interested in materials that are unstable to temperature or light conditions, because these changes are related to internal processes such as emotions. I understand the space (sites, canvas, molds or bodies) as a great void that I fill with my childhood fantasies, flavors, textures, colors and pleasurable sensations. Through this transmutation of the material world into a new form of existence, I not only re-create myself, but the cosmos too.

My paintings were born from the contemplation of the color palette; this abstract image is expanded to infinite dimensions. Fragmented colors are like the letters that my personal diary writes. Therefore the color compositions mean a chronological order, a time line, a calendar.

I do not create art discourses; I believe that art is the experience of the creative process, and the ouvre, the residual sensation of that process embodied in an image. Sensations, which are the main interest of my visual proposal, shift into an abstract dimension in my paintings and a poetic substance in my sculptural work.