YOSHI'S ALTERED SURFACES

By Manuel Vásquez Ortega | August 16, 2018

In the spaces of Cerquone Projects, Caracas, more than twenty works in medium and large format made by the Venezuelan artist Yoshi during the last seven years make up the exhibition Superficies Alteradas (Altered Surfaces), under the curatorship of Lorena González Inneco and the museography of Jean Nouel.

According to the curator text, the exhibition brings together seven important bodies of work developed by Yoshi where infinite types and grammages of roles have been manipulated and shaped by the different chemical emulsions and industrial materials that the artist inserts to deepen new structures and qualities

Ph: Gustavo Lagarde

According to González Inneco, the main core of Yoshi's work and research has been transforming the fold into an unprecedented dimension of elaboration, whose crucial point and support starts from work on paper, material that becomes a unit in itself , "Capable of creating a distinct and particular perception of drawing, painting and sculpture. The fold is in this case the insistent furrow of which it is used to mobilize it, a unique trace that the artist achieves through the special manipulation of small sketches that are transposed from the paper as a support and matter that emulsifies in the museographic space, detonating the crossing large-scale interventions that consolidate with a flexible and expansive time force in the viewer's perceptive range ".

And it is that the paper was the first means of communication and the first subject with which it was understood since childhood -through the origami and its play factor- to later become the creative support of his work and in the image he personally needed , according to the artist himself: "The paper allowed me to create a language speaking from the primitive of my childhood to express emotions, to discover the notion of body, shape, size, color and more complex issues such as spatial relationships and the idea abstract identity as emotionality (...) Origami is based on repetitive patterns absolutely symmetrical, from lines left, in addition, by an imprint, by the trace of a fold that had to be done to transform a square into a three-dimensional piece".

After almost a decade without exhibiting, Yoshi presents his latest works in Superficies Alteradas, where, according to the curator, "not only has he deployed the use of color as a new element of elaboration, but has opened with greater strength a special angle, a dimension in which the artist confesses what the paper already said by itself: the direct connection with the body, with its own body as a recondite point of a strategy that is revealed in each fold, in each stroke, in each story of these groups of works that are in space".