Paola Vega:
The Mystery of Painting

Paola Vega: The Mystery of Painting

By Patrick Frank

In recent years, several Latin American artists have expanded the boundaries of their media. Some of their strategies include painting on huge, curved canvases and setting them outdoors; using sculpture groups as installations for specific sites; and defying gravity by suspending structures in space with cords. Argentine painter Paola Vega is also expanding her medium, and her ends and means are unique and ambitious.

She paints abstractly at a scale to engulf and surround the viewer, filling the visual field. The works cover most of the available wall space, immersing us at every turn. Her color choices and paint handling encourage this: Loose patches of color based on sky, clouds, flowers, and trees, float and drift in an indefinite pictorial space, aided by textured brushwork. But the canvases are not chaotic compositions; they show both harmonious colors and stately rhythms, promoting an attitude of receptivity in the viewer. Paola Vega shows us the Mystery of Painting when we lose ourselves in enchantment, embraced by the works’ suggestive colors and reflective mood. 

This is an audacious goal in our driven and precarious world, beset as we are by social forces, environmental crisis, and political uncertainty. But the unstable world only makes her artistic mission more urgent, calling forth a vigorous and unmistakable response. Paola Vega equal to the task, as she has shown in several installations in galleries on three continents. She created this exhibition especially for the walls in this gallery.

She wrote, “The art that I believe in—and art is about belief—is art that comes to us, touches us, and enthralls us: There it is, calling to us with a beating heart.” This exhibition, her first in the Western United States, invites us to immerse ourselves.

Paola Vega (Argentina, 1980)

She has a degree in History and is a Professor of History from Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied with prominent Latin American artists such as: Jorge Gumier Maier, Diana Aisenberg, Pablo Siquier and Tulio de Sagastizábal. She obtained the Torch Scholarship for studies in argentina. In 2011 she was chosen to participate in the Artists Program of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella with the mentorship of the renowned Argentine artist Jorge Macchi. In 2015, she participated in a residency in Madrid at the Museo del Prado Archive. The following year he obtained the Oxenford Foundation Travel Grant to carry out field work in Houston and New York; and in 2020 Activar Patrimonio Grant. She is co-founder of the PintorAs group since 2009 and in which she participates to this day.

She has continuously exhibited individually in renowned centers, galleries and national and international museums, among them we can name: Galería Belleza y Felicidad (2005), at Museo MACRO in Rosario, Santa Fe (2009), at Galería Abate (2013), at Centro Cultural Recoleta (2015) and Alimentación30, Madrid (2015), at Galería Mite with her exhibition Ebury (2018), Inventario at Prisma KH (2018), Los días soleados at Centro Cultural Kirchner (2019); La vida de las pinturas, Galería Calvaresi (2020). She carried out her site-specific project Esplendor (2016-2018) on a 300-meter retaining wall of the Riachuelo de Buenos Aires. Likewise, she collectively participated in notable exhibitions, such as: Arte y Literatura, MALBA (2002); 2D, Centro Cultural Parque España (2005); ¿Por qué pintura?, Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2007); Elogio da diversidade, Río de Janeiro (2010); pintorAs, Galería Magda Belloti, Madrid (2013); El Teatro de la Pintura, MAMBA (2014); Pintura Post Post, Fundación Osde (2015); Cero Normal, Galería Instituto de Visión, Bogotá (2015), Las decisiones del tacto, Casa de América, Madrid (2017); Assemblage #12 À même la peau, Space in progress, París (2018); pintorAs 10 años, Usina de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2019); Convergence and Crash, Lacaprojects, Charlotte, North Carolina (2019). In 2021 she was invited to participate in Premio Trabucco of painting of Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, also to participate in the Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes, and in the first edition of the Premio 8M of the Palais de Glace and Ministerio de Cultura de La Nación.