Ana María Rueda

Ana María Rueda

Interacting with Ana Maria´s work implies encountering surfaces wherein sensitivity essentially resides; surfaces (i.e., of materials, objects, bodies, the artist´s, the spectators’), which like the human skin, entail an intimate relation between an interior realm they perceive and express, and an exterior world with which they interrelate –thus defining themselves in the process. Thanks to her work, wood, canvas, gauze and translucid paper are expressive of their own material quality; at the same time, they allow the artist to communicate her perceptions, her intuitions, her experiences. They become, in a way, her own skin; Between bleeding and the evanescence of form; between what can be barely perceived in a dot of light and the richness of what is discovered once it is considered in detail; between the reflective quality of substances like water, and their susceptibility to be affected and changed. The physical qualities of the paper and each of the realities present on it also become symbolic, i.e., the paper as skin; the blood as sign of life and death; the water as body; the light as both a blinding and as a revealing source; obscurity as something ominous and protective. Since the eighties, when Ana Maria´s career started, these kinds of interactions, as well as the intimate links between the formal means, the human body and nature have been a leitmotiv in her work. The materials, supports, lines, textures, colors, layout and composition are expressive in themselves; they express and communicate through their physicality. But they are also symbolic of human behaviors and their effects on others and nature. They allude to profound connections between human beings and the world to which they belong and destroy, notwithstanding their dependence on it. The language of the skin in her works bespeaks not only of the artist´s experiences, but also of that and those which in her Colombian context have been affected and vulnerated by historic and current sociopolitical conflicts and socioenvironmental imbalances. The skin reveals them in their sensitivity, their sensuality, their solitude, their empathy and their pain.

María Margarita Malagón-Kurka

June, 2022