The "Casa/Jardín/Ventanas" Project includes three space interventions, which are the following:

Casa (House): Intervention of the wall on the façade of the Library Building.

The selection of the house as an icon for the proposal on the Library building wall originates in the fact that it is the image of something man-made, which turns us into inhabitants, conveyors of knowledge. In treating the building, which is part of the University (the house of knowledge) and contains a Library and an Exhibition Room, we are invited to reflect on art as the house of visual sensitivities and, at the same time, the building carries the message: this is the house of painting.

Pictorial language is for me a universe in itself with its inherent poetry. It is the visual result of a combination between intuition and reflection. The actual current of painting’s purpose (it has been in the past ornament, style, expression, etc.), allows me to play with it in order to achieve other creations that are not necessarily conventional framed-paintings. In this case with paint I build a house, the primary sketch that comes to mind when you think of "a house", the house belonging to everyone.

The artwork hanging on the concrete wall is printed on a polyvinyl canvas enabling the image to be reproduced in mural dimensions through digital manipulation. The image of the work in the form of a house façade is the product of the juxtaposition -as bricks- of scanned rectangular elements of real paintings, which when randomly combined following a chosen outline, give rise to the birth of an abstraction: the house-picture. The proportion of the rectangles is, in actual scale, that of an ordinary construction brick.

Jardín (Garden): Intervention of the landscape north of the Library Building.

The need to insist on a language (painting) and on a support (acrylic on canvas), both apparently saturated, leads me to adopt new forms of painting with and for something other than painting for the sake of painting. My interest is to evidence one of the most visual and enigmatic features of nature: the repetition of a specific shape, the accumulation of a particular element, the entropy and order within chaos, resulting in striking images. I have previously made several interventions of space with this resource of repeating elements and adding color to create gardens. They are also the symbol of the expectation of the human race’s desire to recover Paradise Lost.

For this exhibit at the USB, I have worked on 2,500 m2 of land north of the Library. Thousands of little orange, pink and red flags cover an area of nine square plots, The contrast of these bright colors with the green grass gives an opening to entropyc dynamics. The descending entropy -order- takes place through the location of the tiny flags poles within a designed lattice, and the entropy -trend towards disorder- is generated by the arbitrary location of colors within the plots.

I invite the public to "pick the flowers", that is, the flags, on Sunday May 24, when the exhibit closes.

Ventanas (Windows): Exhibition of recent works at the Art Gallery of the Library.

The exhibited works are part of a pictorial research that I have been working on
since 1996. The technique used is collage of acrylic painted pieces of canvas glued onto another painted canvas. These two-dimensional works have a spatial peculiarity that I insist in exaggerating with the use of 3-D Chromadepht eye glasses. These glasses allow an unusual and additional interpretation of the pictures. They are based on the contrast between primary colors and the drawing of lines and abstract forms. In placing these cuttings (of geometric shapes) and gluing them onto the background (a picture done in the same technique as that of the cutting) different planes and a visual depth enhanced by the glasses, are achieved on the resulting painting.

This part of the exhibition is called "Windows" because the works are the possible windows of the House hung on the façade of the Library. It is as is each one of these rectangles (paintings with depth) would allow us to look out from the inside of the House into the outer universe to which the House and its Garden belong.

Patricia Van Dalen.
Caracas, november de 1997.