CARLA AROCHA

AROCHA/ SCHRAENEN

CV

Carla Arocha has long exhibited a preoccupation with surface. By extension, she often focuses on the thorny role of decoration in fine art — whether her materials are Plexiglas, mirrors, velvet, latex, or stainless steel. Her ongoing collaborative projects with Belgian artist Stéphane Schraenen since 2006 are a stunning foray into the dialogue of international modernism.Their recent sculptures recall the shimmering facades of urban skyscrapers, conceptual notions of reflectiveness, glamorous patterns in fashion, and, due to its transparency, the curious tension between seeing and being seen.

Text excerpts by Jean Charles Vergne, 2006

Vocabulary: toolbox

Carla Arocha works by constantly mixing genres, exploiting realms as diverse as design, architecture
and fashion in order to create installations, paintings and drawings that carry on a tradition instigated
by American Minimalists and Pop Art. Her artwork always takes into account the exhibition space,
immersing the viewer into vast pictorial environments, where tinted Plexiglas and reflective materials
mingle with tiny paintings and drawings of nearly invisible Lilliputian motifs. The formal Serialism of
these motifs recalls Steve Reich’s musical experiments; their silent facet evokes the sound-latency
of composers such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. The success of such an undertaking is due to
the highly pertinent selections and arrangements, which ultimately produce works marked by a strong
formal rigor and graced with an astounding delicacy and poetry, considering the formal coolness of the
materials’ type and layout.
If Carla Arocha’s vocabulary seems to draw on syntaxes from Constructivism, from Suprematism and its
related artistic trends, from Hard-Edge all the way to Optical Art, now and again elusively citing artists
such as Piet Mondrian or Barnett Newman – see the painting Zipper and the large Plexiglas curtain
Zipper Red done in 2000 – her aim is not to spin out a formal reflection on this kind of abstraction, but
rather to utilize a vocabulary and its decorative/ornamental extensions as if it were an autonomous
alphabet, much like any language that comes with its tics, clichés, stereotypes and common
expressions. For quite some time, a certain kind of abstraction had grappled with a primitive vocabulary
made up of points, circles, lines, grids and geometry. This syntax of origins, altered by the desire to
disembody images, makes up the nuts and bolts of Carla Arocha’s toolbox.
As with any toolbox, Carla Arocha’s toolbox is not an end in itself. It contains the levers and utensils that
are necessary for cutting up, assembling, merging and matching bits of reality.