Where can I see her art?
Instagram: @lezama.carolina
Website: https://www.carolinalezama.com/
You can also attend one of her weekly art workshops ('from pencil to oil' and 'drawing techniques') in Caracas.
Carolina Lezama is an Architect and Visual Artist who lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela. She has an affectionate and mellow personality that is driven by curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Her study of light, color and space is the center of her art work.
Her Story
" My father was a filmmaker. He studied in Los Angeles and worked for a big advertising firm. He used to tell me I was going to be an artist because I have always loved to draw and paint. I wanted to be like him, but he once told me advertising was a 'made up world'. I remember doing a career test at school. The results came back saying: art, art, art, architecture. So I decided to become an architect and graduated in 1984 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. I worked in architecture for 30 years. At 50 years old, I found myself dealing with an empty nest after my three children moved out of the country. I needed to reinvent myself. So I completed a Bachelors in Art at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and became a Visual Artist. "
Her Work
I remember seeing your work Luciernagas displayed in Caracas. Tell me the story behind it.
"I was travelling in the Brazilian jungle. I was at a field with crops. There were even telenovelas named after this place. At night, the fireflies came out and I lived through beauty, the sublime, and the extraordinary. I spent five years trying to represent this moment, but nothing was right. "
" After Luciernagas I wanted to create a more interactive and immersive work for the viewer. This is when I created Espacio. It is composed of four hundred laser lights with colors. "
" All my work has a whole research that happens behind its creation. I don't like producing churros: a thousand of the same paintings. It has to have a back story. "
Where do you find inspiration?
" I am always looking for a theme for my art workshops; to use as the basis of creation. I remember I had an art workshop on big format painting and I just watched Atlantis the lost city, the Disney movie. I painted what looked to be abstract but for me, it was a little fish near their mother's gigantic eye, similar to the ship they have in the movie. Everything I do has a story behind it. But unless I tell you what it means to me, it is up to the viewer to interpret. "
What is Architecture?
" Architecture has a function. It has a creation process. It gives beauty to a space so humans can live well. "
What is Art?
" Art is creating beauty. Art and beauty speak the same language. I am not referring to superficial beauty based on people's tastes (likes and dislikes). I am referring to the emotion that art can trigger so the viewer reaches sublimity. For example, a lightning strike causes fear and amazement, pure darkness causes terror and bewilderment, and the birth of a child causes plenitude. They are universal circumstances. Art has to be universal. It should show everyone's problems. It must trigger in the viewer the feeling that they too have lived through it. "
Tell me about your research on light, color and space
Carolina's research is mostly centered in: light, color and space. Her documentary produced by Miguel Curiel explains what she has learned and what most fascinates her. It is divided in two sections, starting with "Where is the color?" followed by "The history of men through images".
Carolina starts the documentary by posing the question "Where is the color?" and she proceeds to explain that
"The color is in us. Objects absorb all the colors except the one we see. Newton studied the prism and the decomposition of light into the seven colors of the spectrum. But I find more fascinating Goethe's work on the theory of colors. Including research on shade, the color wheel, the decomposition of primary and secondary colors and complementary colors. Through experiments, Goethe shows that (1) "if there is no medium, we do not see light" and that (2) "light brings its source". For example, the atmosphere acts as a medium causing us to see the sun in shades of yellow, orange and red which are not its true color. "
Carolina's second statement from Goethe's research "light brings its source" reminded me of when I witnessed a solar eclipse. One way to see the solar eclipse was to look at the shadow of the trees. The shadow of trees usually show concentric circles of light within the darkness on the ground, but on that day, you could see the edge of the circles gradually change reflecting the current shape of the solar eclipse.
Carolina continues explaining her research on Goethe by describing the "psychology of color" and the emotions that color can trigger.
" White is the color that has every color within. It transmits purity, peace, tranquility, excellence, innocence, sterility, cleanliness, frigidity and light. Black represents darkness, death, and elegance. Gray which is both light and darkness represents neutrality, indecisiveness, sadness, doubt, and melancholy. On the other hand, the color yellow shows joy, eternity, life, movement, wishes of freedom, and some negative connotations such as envy, anxiety, and cowardliness. We have red which has always been used to display passion, emotion, action, fire, blood, war, cruelty, and ambition. Then orange is the balance between red and yellow. It transmits passion and joy. Experts also say it wakes up our hunger. Moreover, blue depicts intelligence, trust, logic, reflection, coldness, the infinity of the sky and the depths of the ocean. The color purple has two sides. The first mystical side transmits melancholy, introspection, dignity and royalty. While the second side, mixed with black, gives a feeling of prostitution, misery and pain. Green has always represented nature, what is fresh and a sense of calm. And brown is used to represent balance and the earth where we stand. "
In the documentary, Carolina then moves on to "The history of men through images" emphasizing on the evolution of color. She begins by saying that "art explains human behavior."
" Men started drawing in caves such as "Las Cuevas de Altamira". At this moment, men do not have conscience so they paint what they see. They represent identical images of reality, of what to expect outside of the cave. The colors used are based on what they have available as painting tools, browns and reds. This is followed by Egypt where color is used to represent emotions. We see Pharaohs painted in blue and scaled bigger than their subjects to show power. The color blue is used to represent deity and the sky. Did you know the Parthenon in Greece which is Athena's temple had color originally?. Then we move on to the Byzantine Empire filled with the color gold to represent the light of God. And we also keep seeing the color blue to represent deity with Jesus dressed in blue robes.
" Later during the Renaissance period, there is a point where we start seeing black to represent power. In "La Gioconda" by Leonardo Da Vinci we notice how colors are used to accurately illustrate humans. The colors stop being idyllic and start to try to resemble more of what we see. Her skin is a tone of yellow. Then in the Romance period we see sensitivity and feelings of terror, anguish, desperation, anxiety, and beauty being depicted. An example is Goya's "Saturn devouring his son" with red and yellow colors. Color and light take on a new meaning during the Impressionism period, where painters worked outside, showing colors not exactly based on reality but on how we perceive it. Monet represented the "Rouen Cathedral" three times since the color we perceive changed based on the time of day. And with the Post-Impressionism came the beginning of Abstraction. You can see how works based on shapes, like Cezanne's, come together to depict an image. "
Carolina speaks of how "the Greeks represented reality to its perfection and that this continued through the 1600's classic painters. Then, the industrial revolution came and with it the photographic camera which could materialize reality. During the next years of war, humanity turned their lens inward. And this is where you start seeing abstract artists such as Freud, Dali, Dada, and Picasso. They paint emotion. It is the unconscious coming out. "
" That leads us to Abstraction which searches for what is inside us, for the subjective and the unreal. We have the Vanguard movement which depicts war, destruction, pain, anti-classism, and anti-academia. Then with Cubism in works like Picasso's we see color evolving and not try to resemble reality. We see Suprematism depicting suppressed feelings with no figures. And Neoplasticism with lines and colors. My favorite is Kinetic art where Soto's "Nube Amarilla" shows us how is possible to materialize a cloud and de-materialized the human that goes into it. And Cruz-Diez shows us how different he sees space and color through color decomposition. "
Carolina says "Kinetic art is where I integrate. I feel a lot of connection to it. It depicts vibration, connectedness, the void, and how to create space through color and light.
What are you focused on now?
" My latest work is called Cilindro. It started as a model for a bigger space at Embassy hotel in Caracas but its development is on hold due to the country's situation. So I turned the model into the work of art itself. "
Carolina is also preparing 20 smaller works to auction at Playa Azul Foundation fundraiser Cena del Chef which will donate the proceedings to the employees.
" The main theme is 'water'. I am taking this theme and transforming it with elements of light, color, space, vibration and kinetic art. The works includes abstract and figurative styles. One of the abstract works is made using a pointillism technique and the viewer's imagination leads their brain to see something within. On the other hand, the figurative works show reality. They are a representation of something that happened. One of the figurative works is based on a painter called Turner. History says he immersed himself into a storm by tying himself to a ship's mast in order to paint it. "
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