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Patricia Van Dalen |
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Critics and Patricia Van Dalen's work |
| Rafael Osío Cabrices Journalist. Excerpt from the text “The country of flashes that issues postcards” of the catalogue for the solo exhibition "Colección primavera-verano 2010” (Collection spring-summer 2010) at Galería La Cuadra, Caracas, 2010. |
 “It is a journey of exploration through an alternate country made of light spears and colored shrapnel. A country that reveals itself in numerous glimpses; a country that is neither homogeneous nor boring: there are jungles and cities on it, clear skies and almighty tempests, quietude and violence.The voyage begins with a forest: Estacion (Station), a mural almost four meters long greeting visitors to Galeria La Cuadra. The powerful image created by the imposing foliage of color lamellas on vertical descent evokes the feeling of being struck by fascination and hesitation as one walks upon the outer boundaries of a dense jungle. What is to be found inside? Parques (Parks), a group five works placed on the adjacent wall, answers this question and reveals what would happen if we let ourselves be carried away by curiosity about this new world. Then there are seven collages named after colors, each telling a different story, an anecdote perhaps, about the days elapsed in the remote, hypnotic country created for us by Patricia Van Dalen (…) The collages sometimes incorporate the watermarks of the papers used by the artist, Arches or Fabriano, discrete typography normally condemned to unnoticed death on the garbage bin which is here dignified as it blends with the rich texture of the works. Twenty-one postcards, made also out of Arches or Fabriano paper, substantiate the metaphor of that other place promoted by the exhibition. They allow Van Dalen to give us an idea of the vastness of the region she set out to explore. They are numerous messages from very diverse climates and topographies, written with rich tonal variations of the same colors used in the larger works in the collection.” |
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| María Elena Ramos Art researcher. Excerpt from the text “Patricia Van Dalen: Color, Fragment, and Mediation” of the catalogue for the solo exhibition "Color fragmentado” (Fragmented color) at the Sala TAC, Caracas, 2008. |
 «Patricia Van Dalen's exhibition, "Fragmented Colors", is at once a joyous event for the eyes, a celebration of life and nature, and a space of rationality and structure. An artist is what he makes, what he is able to objectify: the work that, coming from the artist's hands, transcends him. Moreover, there is no artist without produced work, some achieved form of materialization (regardless of how conceptual its origin and how immaterial its density). No one earns the name of painter until the proof is in the canvas.But even before that, an artist is also what from always has happened to him: his memories and passion, his obsessions, his elective decisions. And so it is also true that there is no painting without a painter (without his spiritual depth, the joy he takes from his senses as he faces the universe around him). (...) The works of this exhibition are the response to Van Dalen's current research, who has not only kept probing in her visions of nature, but who now specially heeds the theme, so contemporary, of fragmentation –of image, of the painting, of form, of space, of plane, of color. In this sense, we can note how this exposition deals with the fragmentary condition both in its unifying parts (each "fragment" proper) as in the making of the total spaces of each of the works. And furthermore, within the very structuring of the group of pieces that compose the internal games of the exhibit, of which Miguel Miguel's curatorship is a particularly enlightening reading.» |
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| Axel Stein Art historian. Excerpt from the text for the brochure for the solo exhibition "Luminous Gardens” at the Fairchild Tropical Garden, Coral Gables, USA, 2003. |
 «In recent years, Van Dalen's research has led her to work to the "en plein air" . Following the logic of her collage compositions, Van Dalen skips phase one so the landscape itself becomes the background for her stripes. In the Fairchild's project, these are methodically arranged to suggest a bar code shape. Color is given by 100,000 orange, red and pink vinyl marker flags that seem to float over the very green central garden's "Lowlands". The 14 stripes are 250 feet long and 10 feet wide to form a 62,500 square foot composition. The bars are perfectly aligned with the cardinal points: North and South. There appears to be a will to confront the user-friendly nature of the botanical garden with a composition that seems to propose the antagonistic cold shower of an implacable formal mandate. However rigorous, the composition is overwhelmingly dominated by joyful fun, a key element that Van Dalen further exploits by handing visitors 3D Chroma Depth glasses that provide the viewer with a surprising added value.» |
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| Katherine Chacón Art researcher. Excerpt from the text for the catalogue for Arco'02 Contemporany Art Fair. Madrid, Spain. 2002. |
 «It is relevant to remember here that painting is for Van Dalen a means of expression that the artist shares with other media, as for example, installations, most of which become an integral part of the landscape or the surrounding space. This helps us to understand the freedom with which Van Dalen's pictorial work incorporates unusual resources through the years, seems to draw nourishment from certain installation conceptual parameters.» |
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| Luis Miguel Isava Writer. Excerpt from the text for the catalogue (unpublished) of the solo exposition "Casa/Jardín/Ventanas", (House/Garden/Windows) at Universidad Simón Bolívar. Caracas, 1998. |
 «In the first place, these rectangular shaped cut-outs become micro-paintings in themselves, which produces a sort of mise en abîme. In the second place, in some of these cut-outs we recognize the floral motifs of previous paintings, which indicates a material defeat of those attempts at figuration. In the end and as a result of a surprising inversion these overlapping cut-outs are what interrupts the possibility of reading what the "repressed" painting in the background could have made possible. The form/inform tension is still present; but there has occurred a transition, a displacement in the process; now it is the formless inscription of color which invites a reading that the collage elements disarticulate formally and systematically. The will to shape a form that in the beginning reinforced the legibility of this work, now deconstructs it. The discoursive character has been dissociated from the tension, to become integrated to the drive of the formless. Tension has unfolded, duplicating itself internally.» |
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| Víctor Guédez Art Critic. Excerpt from the text for the catalogue of the exposition "Cosecha 97", (Harvest 97) at the Grupo Li Centro de Arte. Caracas, 1997. |
 «Patricia
Van Dalen´s recent work proposes anew a curious
cohabitation between the two basic trends in abstract art.
(…) As a matter of fact, a retrospective revision of
her work puts us in touch with a pendular dynamic, where
strong expressive, cosmic, spiritual stages alternate with
those in which an organic, compositional restlessness
prevails. In fact, we think that this work by Patricia van
Dalen reflects also the analytic and evaluative process
[that] she has undertaken in regard to her own
previous work. It could be said that this piece sheds light
on the episode of an unfolding process where the revision
and the recontextualization of a statement become part of
the statement itself.» |
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Marianella Guevara |
 «After the fragmentary and "movimentato" hurricane of the collage, to the prodigious and expectant spring, Patricia Van Dalen´s work suspends vision beyond all imaginable limits, stratosphere, vision from the outside and from the inside, where the perception of a new haven is founded. Attentive, she creates a structure with the colors that have always belonged to her.Construction of a territory. Delimitation of a space arising from the stain, chromatic forms that cohabitate in a chaotic equilibrium, "to transpose order from disorder" Elevation, resonance of a preeminent color: blue, "kyanos", visible darkness and profundity. (…) The blue of the faraway, spectral norse that takes hold of Van Dalen´s canvases, to begin a new stage of work. Initiation, measure of a sacred evolving process marked by the immutable stroke of gestuality.» |
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| Luis Angel Duque Art researcher. Excerpt from the text for the catalogue of the exposition "Primera Bienal Gran Premio Dimple" at the Centro de Bellas Artes, Maracaibo, Zulia. 1993. |
 «The space of heaven and earth surfaces in Patricia Van Dalen´s expansive gestual work; she has guided her work through greatly attuned color expressions. Now, her wish to liberate the pictorial principle from all conventions reaches its full splendour, and gestures are as many astral orbits in a convulsed sky, like the blooms of an exalted wilderness. A special vibration pulsates throughout the space of her "Primavera" (Spring), as if the artist were approaching, by stages, through color, the spirit of nature.» |
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| Roberto Guevara Art Critic. Excerpt from the text for the catalogue for the solo exposition "Huracán" ("Hurricane"), at Galería Uno, Caracas. 1992. |
 «Patricia Van Dalen has been a solitary standard-bearer in the fiery field of maximum-impact colors. Her work pursues the consolidation of a language, and by contrast, to unfold it over and over again. Primary colors constitute in that language a sort of substantial alphabet, which the artist knows how to manipulate better than anybody else, the wisdom of its elementary force. Here, primary color means essential, primary force, an exalted category of reality. After practicing with paint on canvas, the return to collage produces new events. The work is composed and decomposed through complex, often unpredictable processes. Let us say that sometimes paint can be applied in a single stroke on the canvas, and later follow in succession the gestures and violent impulses that the painted collage adds, and that even later new layers of matter - both paint or canvas- may occur, interventions of actions that may bring new lights, abysses or skies of unknown universes, that may be inside or outside man, that may be real or imaginary.» |
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Hanni Ossott |
We should ask ourselves how much peace and how much anguish there is on the canvas and on the paper, how many crisscrossed bolts of lightning, haw many furies. We should have to learn about the other silence, the unspoken paint, the detained stroke.» |
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Roberto Guevara |
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María Elena Ramos |
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«We should ask ourselves ¿what is the meaning of this work? Color on color. Construction of colors. Strokes on the canvas. Lightning. Fulminations. Bursts of light. 
«She makes or finds the fragments of matter herself for her great picture-collages. She fabricates this material fully aware that it has its very own inner charge, and then employs it to compose other baroque visions, sumptuously charged with suggestions and chromatic interrogations, where the viewer moves inside universes in the making. Each one of her works is therefore a transit, not a final static result. (…) The proposition lies on the critical limit of abstraction. On the one hand, too many appeals to perception, that tend to organize forests, abysses, planets or unusual natural kingdoms; on the other, no recognizable sight, no allusion. A crest with two slopes, with no limits.»
«Patricia recalls from her childhood the colors of the city of Maracaibo, she recalls the lights of Holland, or the plastic bubbles, the red skateboard, hands sticky with finger paint, running over white paper. Memories of color-light, of color-pigment, of color-manual work, that somehow come to life in these pictorial diaries she has created since 1983.»
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