In her work, Adriana Arenas uses the codes and iconography of traditional genres and Latin American popular culture. The result is a visual and auditory space that invites the viewer to contemplate other modes of consciousness, to enter into individual and collective histories and into the poetry of unfamiliar places.
Adriana Arenas is a young video artist of Colombian origin, living in New York, whose work was discovered by New Yorkers in 2000 during her highly acclaimed presentation at PS1, in the opening exhibition Greater New York. Since then, she has had a series of exhibitions in various American art centers. You could discover in our Parisian space a first installation in the framework of the Paris-Brooklyn exchange with the Roebling-Hall gallery, last year. Wishing to follow up on the appreciation of the public, we decided to continue its programming this year, by proposing you to discover the installation created for PS1 : Sweet Illusion.
Adriana Arenas uses in her work the codes and iconography of traditional genres and Latin American popular culture. The result is a visual and auditory space that invites the viewer to contemplate other modes of consciousness, to enter into individual and collective histories and into the poetry of unfamiliar places. In her installations, made of several monitors, Adriana Arenas juxtaposes sentimental and popular songs from her native country -whose texts are simultaneously transcribed on small video screens in acid colors- and projections on large screens evoking themes of love, inter-racial relationships and colonialism. Her work is borrowed from an old-fashioned romanticism, a sort of hymn to lost innocence, an imaginary, poetic and alchemical machine, invented in order to find and resurrect lost emotions.
Sweet Illusion, presented on the first floor of the gallery, is the perfect illustration. This installation is composed of a double wall projection representing the mirror image of a giant cotton candy machine that the artist filmed in a vast Colombian landscape. The regular and mechanic movements, throbbing, that support and prolong the duplication of the image, focus the gaze -and very quickly the mind- in the center of this cottony material. The softness of the image invites us to plunge into our own "candy pink" memories. Authentic playful landscape of an allegorical machine, the image irresistibly provokes the reminiscence of our childish universe, while the melodies of three love songs, in Spanish language, warm and rhythmic, finish sending us back to an impalpable and sweet past.
Inevitably, this work sends us back to kitsch, as much by the atmosphere that emerges from it as by its installation device. Thus the words of the songs are simultaneously translated in English and retranscribed on a monitor in a romantic character in saturated colors which return to the universe of the karaoke. But the obvious distancing between the song in Spanish and its English retranscription puts the viewer in front of his impossibility of introducing himself in this lost paradise.