Wait ´til I tie my shoe, the most recent work by Natalia Castañeda wonders about the immediate and invites the spectator to stop and think about the anecdotic. The title suggests a daily action, a necessary interruption in the middle of a continuous happening.
From its beginnings, Castañeda´s work has been developed from the idea of contemplation, as a paused action to understand and recognize the landscape, and also as a way to comprehend the surroundings and the shapes that Nature integrates. The artist uses various objects that take part in the landscape – being this a natural or a domestic landscape – and puts them into different contexts, keeping an essential and poetical closeness to the images. Along her career, Castañeda has used various resources to amplify the limits of drawing and painting – getting close to sculpting processes – by creating topographic relations between objects, space and the spectator.
For this show, the artist reflects upon painting and the exercise of representing, as a visual fact of an extended temporality through images. Castañeda presents a series of paintings in small and medium format that, not only exist as image/reflection before the presence of the objects, but also as group of anecdotes that find correspondence through their narrative potential. The display of the process, meaning the image side to side with its referent, questions the distance of the mimic exercise and reminds the temporary resistance of the painting before the object´s expiration date.
The apparent stillness of images presents a sum of moments and at the same time an indispensable pause, like tying one´s shoe. An exercise on returning to the present. An event where movement is perceived through the stillness of the image.
Daniela Cortés
