The working method of the Leipzig-based artist Carolina Pérez Pallares is rooted in an artistic practice that does not view painting as a self-contained medium, but rather as an open system of thought, perception and action. Building on an expanded concept of painting, she liberates colour, material and gesture from their traditional ties to the canvas and transforms them into large-scale installations, performances and fragile arrangements, in which objects, traces and actions coalesce into process-oriented constellations.
Carolina Pérez Pallares was born in 1980 in Quito (Ecuador) and lives and works in Leipzig. She is a graduate of the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and a master’s student of Prof. Marijke van Warmerdam. Her works have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions (MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Quito, Ecuador, Kunstraum V8 Plattform in Karlsruhe, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Gallery of Stadt Sindelfingen, amongst others) as well as in group exhibitions. In her works, plaster, paper, wood, fabric, pigment and found materials enter into a dialogue with painterly compositions and performative gestures. Nothing appears to be permanently fixed; rather, the installations convey the impression that they exist in a state of perpetual possibility. Colour is never merely a surface here. It becomes an independent agent that structures spaces, directs movements and establishes relationships between the elements.
In her current solo exhibition at D21 Kunstraum, Carolina Pérez Pallares explores the annual theme ‘ALIEN’ in a subjective and autobiographical manner. In the newly created works, which the artist has installed as part of her engagement with the space, she examines the relationship between colour, process and space, as well as intermediality, materiality and the role of the viewer’s perspectives. Drawing on her own biography, she is particularly concerned with the performative context of everyday life, the public and the private, the representation of otherness, the relationship between arriving and leaving, and the influence of cultural codes on the subjective experience of migration.
To make these experiences of boundaries and otherness perceptible within the space, she transforms the spaces of the D21 Kunstraum into a subjective narrative composed of colours, forms, materials and their textures. To this end, she will compose a large-scale spatial collage from overpainted photographs, murals, videos and sculptural structures, transforming the D21 Kunstraum into an installation to be understood as a complete work, which makes her connection to various places just as perceptible as the temporal dimensions and emotions of her own biography and experience. The structure of the premises may serve as a guiding principle. However, the openness of Carolina Pérez Pallares’ works allows for very few fixed definitions.
Through various states, atmospheres, levels and proportions, the exhibition evolves into a walk-in metaphor, a space for exploration in which one can delve deeper into the artistic engagement with experiences of otherness and boundaries, questions of identity and social role, as well as attributions, debates on nationality and discourses on belonging.
“I am driven by the moment in which perception and imagination interpenetrate and in which what is seen is reimagined. For me, art is not merely the creation of reality, but rather an autonomous reality in its own right which, once it exists, inevitably penetrates our consciousness.”
