After a four-year absence from the Venezuelan exhibition circuit, Susana Mundarain—who lives in Pittsburgh, PA-recently returned with a show titled Duos, Studies, and Miniatures, which brought together her most recent work, full of a vital sensuality embellished with the dazzling color of the tropics that is becoming more forceful than ever in the work of this abstract artist.
Canvases grouped together as Mixed media, diptychs, and triptychs in a daring medium-sized format evoked spaces and images through flat tones which contrasted with deeper areas in which the gestural elements appeared discreet, intelligent, and balanced (though not lacking in passion). The use of black was both inventive and conciliatory, allowing the blurs and warm colors to reveal all their splendor and generate an atmosphere of contrasts in the exhibition room. The metallic colors were another interesting feature that broadened the sensorial repertoire which the artist proposes to the spectator, transforming each work into an experience, a visual and spiritual kind of experimentation. The structures adopted by the canvases —the series of fine rectangles, a hollowed-out square— reflected both the formal and conceptual versatility of the work, recreating abstract landscapes of an extinct world or a world still in the future.
These pieces were complemented by two series of small format collages —titled Referential and Miniatures— in which the drawing appears serene and free, a kind of sketch in search of an imaginative irreverence, stripped of any narrative or anecdotal requirements or references. The accumulation of materials characteristic of the collage medium abandoned its original baroque character in these little jewels, giving way to surfaces of enormous purity and visual versatility.
Duos, Studies, and Miniatures was a mature and solid show, reflecting a rounded personality that is of outstanding importance in the national artistic scene. It provided an opportunity to note some of the processes which have characterized her work: the straight lines which formerly inverted the exhibition space in general, with the limits being established by the canvases themselves, have now been introduced into the work, creating virtual horizontals, cartographies, undifferentiated segments-eloquent traces of the integrity with which Amundarain approaches her pictorial work.
JACQUELINE GOLDBERG