Marco Rodríguez del Camino

We say that the colors are warm and cold, moody, and we have always taken this as an invitation so through them one can express emotion, the blindness and dumbness in us. And then they become in perceptions that can be seen, the body takes as its own expression. The body becomes light; they are as gradations of awareness of interiority. Within the visual arts and in themselves, moreover, the colors represent the most purely art.

And this stunning or abstract effect, which in principle produces non figurative evidences, causes the planes of the painting. In general, outside of the scope, the line comes into play containing colors, or demarcating places, planes and shapes. At the viewer's eyes, planes and colors, lines and contours are presented with the same spontaneity of the rain or sprouting grass: they simply stick out from the invisible, the how to do this is the work of the artist.

However, what he calls our attention in the work of Luisa Richter is not the forms that she gives the magma of these eruptions; it is the way it delays, opens and shows us the steps of a reflection on each piece.

It is worth remembering that Luisa started painting cuts and landslides in Venezuela, colors and underground lighting (levels of seen in the darkness, we are saying: paintings, expressions). Starting by showing cuts of the land is like to exploit the mine of the plastic arts: it gives us glimpses of the transit of what one can see to what is not seen.

And since those cuts up to her latest work, it raises the earth as a mirror of what (we) happens, and the space between you and the earth (including blindness and glare) as an incubation within from which the work flows. Transfers between these extremes are of the distracted viewer by way of confronting that which embarrasses him. Asserted in the correspondence that he establishes, the artist plastically points the constant path of creation. The road we have traveled together with all that exists, and in which, by following the map of each of her works, we discover similarities with traces of herbs and the stars.

With colors, lines and cuts that she constructs parts that burrow common roots and awaken the consciousness of those communicating vessels, from which the universe is woven. But it’s good to insist on the simplicity of something so complex, because the artist does not refer to absolute but the threads that weave the individual things, not to significances, but to specific steps, clear and timeless. To plastic connections, those that leap to view, they are always the end pursued further. Showings of a clarity that is not satisfied.

Incidentally, besides marking the other end of blindness, dazzling indicates the direction of travel: going towards positive sign blindness only recoverable in the light. For just as when one leaves the hometown returning calls to go around the world, having completed a cycle, we cannot recover blindness but after having seen everything, having covered the whole sphere of reason and light: of distance. Such as described by fairy tales, in the adventure of living, going back equal to regression: while reaching the forest of the birds of light and staying there; on the other hand, forgetting the homeland that awaits for us, of its lack of golden feathers, it would equally be meaningless. That is to say that passion is the momentum of freedom (the possibility, says Luisa) the goal.

Pallet to pallet, bit by bit, there were hauled to the work that we today see, the earth, the gold and the coal, and it was joined on the journey by the own and another wrecks ,as every viewer realizes. Delving into that same mine of living, opening to the eyes t the place of life, displaying it in colors of light is the extraordinary work that is shown to us today. Evidently made with hands: drawings, collages, prints and paintings that in turn work artistically as rooms, grades, levels of understanding.

It is said, by the way, that singing is the first vocal response of the human creature to its environment, and that starts every time alone or in groups, one is absorbed in a manual job. This principle is not beautiful or ugly, it does not refer to either joy or sadness, as there are songs of appreciation and complaint, is a simple fact of humanity. It is obvious that in both primary expressions, that singing can be understood as the voice of all the arts in general. It is what comes from the chest, leaving us, as it contacts with the outside. From what arts return us for understanding. In works that must be transparent, however, because singing gives way and disappears with every tool that comes between the subject and his passion.

Perched on the edge of the white since long ago (of a thousand shades of white that occur in her paintings), in that end of the blindness, trampoline where the body and the passion is out of sight, Luisa paints oil paintings that sing the correspondences between science and poetry. A two-dimensional rhythm, -she says-, raises cold formal compositions, solid intersections, and shows what happens outside and inside, our consistency. As any valid work, it is a trap to catch deepness in the foreground, to put dance in space and time.

Caracas, Venezuela
February 21, 2001