LEFT HAND DRAWINGS, Color pencil drawing on paper / 2024

Can we call these apparent color planes by the artist María Valenzuela a drawing? The artist indeed makes use of the line—one of the graphic elements that make up any drawing. However, the accumulation and layering of these lines lead us into the pictorial plane, while also guiding us through a meditative exercise of breathing and repetition.

The final image—an apparent plane, which is in fact made up of multiple lines—allows the eye to travel through layers of a sum of colors, which our brain then decides to translate into a single one. A very specific color, somewhat unstable—despite its solidity—for even a sharp eye would not be able to define what red it is; which red, among those offered by the art supply market, is the one present here, looking back at us as we observe it.

I imagine these images are made in silence, as the sound of the paper being touched is a fundamental sense in knowing whether the pressure being applied is just enough to caress the pores of the surface without smothering them—thus allowing another glaze to be added on top, likely in a different direction than the previous layer.

It is a kind of hatching that subverts its own nature, for it no longer reveals volume through light and shadow, but instead immerses us in a single luminous plane—a purist nature of color.

Camila Alegría.