Natalia Castañeda Portfolio by NATALIA CASTANEDA

Natalia Casta単eda Arbealez

Natalia Casta単eda Arbelaez Manizales (1982) - Colombia Lives and works in Bogota. Colombia nataliapajara@gmail.com www.territorioscomunes.com Studio: Crr 9 No 54 A 24 apto 201 Bogota. Tel: +57 311 2891715

Holds a Diplome DNSBA Ecole Nacional superieur de Beaux-Arts. Paris. France (2009), Specialization in Multimediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creation (2006) and BFA from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota (2004). Castaneda is an associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes and Universidad El Bosque, Bogota. She has exhibited widely in Colombia and has participated in the CRAC Residence, Chile (2011) and BATISCAFO Residence, Cuba (2006). Her work expands the limits of drawing and painting, bringing them closer to sculpture, creating topographies that reveal themselves through their interaction with the observer. The atmospheric patterns and gestural impulses retain the poetic approach of craftsmanship in order to get immersed into the landscape through unexpected encounters. She works the territory from cartography for free ranging, departing from emotion, memory, the journey and mysticism, and seeking a respectful sight of the environment to restore the essential and spiritual connection with nature.

Education 2009

DIPLOME NATIONAL SUPERIEUR D’ART PLASTIQUE. ENSBA. Ecole National Supérieur de Beaux-Arts Paris. France.

2006

Specialization in Multimedia’s Creation.Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá).

2004

BFA from Universidad de los Andes. Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá).

Solo Exhibitions 2011

“Fictions for a Present Posture” Nueveochenta, Contemporary Art, Manizales, Colombia

2010

“Counting Stones in my Garden at Home” Art Museum of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia

2009

“Blue Exit”. Nueveochenta, contemporary art, Bogota, Colombia “Forest of China” Ecole National Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

2007

“The Illusion of Floating” Nueveochenta Contemporary Art, Bogota, Colombia

2005

“In Paint” Project Room, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombiazzrtt “Common Territories” Jenny Vila Contemporary Art, Cali, Colombia “Common Territories” A/D Amoblamiento, Bogota, Colombia

Distinctions and Awards 2011

International Residence CRAC Valparaiso. Chile.

2010

I Caribbean International Triennial. Santo Domingo. Dominican Republic.

2007

Mention. Young Art Salon, Club El Nogal. Bogota. Colombia IX International Art Biennial of Cuenca. Ecuador.

2006

Batiscafo Project Residence. Havana, Cuba.

2004

Mention National Painting Contest XII BBVA.

Selected Group Exhibitions 2011

New Names BBVA, LuisAngelArango Library, Bogota, Colombia. Before and Through. Alternate Space Gallery, Bogota, Colombia. On traces. AB projects, Toronto, Canada.

2010

In conversation, Nueveochenta Gallery, Bogota, Colombia. 1th TRIENNIAL International CARIBBEAN, Santo Domingo, Dominican R. Asymmetries and convergences. Vermelho Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

2009

Between the lines, MOCA cultural center, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

2008

Prix de Dessin PIERRE DAVID WELL. Academie des Beaux-Arts. Diciembre. Paris.

Hartas Artistas. Bogotá, Cali y Medellin. El siguiente por favor. Nueveochenta Arte contemporaneo. Agosto. Bogotá. Hartas Artistas. Galeria LDF. Junio Buenos Aires. Argentina Melancholia, Opera Garnier. Mayo. Paris Francia.

2007

IX International Biennial of Cuenca, Ecuador. Al agua, Nueveochenta Gallery, Bogota, Colombia. Outdoors, Landscapes of the collection. National Museum of Colombia, Bogota. Two-bimensional Art Exhibition III, Fundacion Gilberto Alzate, Bogota, Colombia. BBVA’s Art Salon, Museum of Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia.

2006

1st Biennial of the Americas Rafael Cauduro. Tijuana, Mexico. Young ArteCamara Art Room. ARTBO, International Art Fair of Bogota. Drawings. Workshop 7. Medellin. “The Cursed circumstances.” Project Batiscafo. Residency Program. Havana. Cuba. ‘Outdoors’. Caldas Art Museum. Manizales. “Painting is what it is.” Fourth Level Gallery. Bogota. “Natures vacuum.” Good man duarte Gallery. Mayo. Bogota. “Bogota: networks and mapping”, Project Multimedia Creation.Collective work. Bogota. Colombia

2005

Exhibition Small-Size, Gallery projects, Bogota. 104 Art Suites. Intervention in room 602 of the 104 Art Suites hotel, Bogota. Videobox “Espaces, histoires de vie et corps (1)”, Vidéo de l’Amerique Latine, Compilation # 4, MISS CHINA LUNCH BOX, Paris, France. Thesis project, The best works of degree, MUSEUM OF ARTcontemporary, Bogota, Colombia. Botero Prize 2005, Colferias, Bogota, Colombia. “Among Seven” “Atelier 7”, Medellin, Colombia.

2004

Mention National Painting Contest XII BBVA, Temporary exhibition hall, Bogota, Colombia.

1999

Exhibition “Izar lo Igualado” University of Caldas, Casa de Poesía Fernando Mejía Mejía, Manizales, Colombia Exhibition “Homenagear a Cro-Magnon”, University of Caldas. Casa de Poesía Fernando Mejía Mejía, Manizales, Colombia

Fictions for a Present Posture offers a domestic scene that allows the viewer to take a seat, and it is the viewer who frames the scene from the set distance where she or he is observing. At the same time, the viewer is included in the scene, between painting and sculpture. This situation proposes recognition of that present state, of that observational gaze turned on oneself, on oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s physical surroundings (sculpture), and on that illusory projection of infinite appearance (painting). This piece offers a detailed approach to the medium, to the physical density of mass and to the circular motion tied in and repeated using color. A weaving of instants that suggest a narrative: an object and a space, a body and a landscape to frame the gaze in the reflection of his or her own position.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Painting: oil on canvas + 1,50 x 2 m + Nueveochenta, Contemporary Art + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Painting: oil on canvas, Scultures: Plaster and recycled polystyrene, paint and wood. Variable dimensions. Nueveochenta, Contemporary Art + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Painting: oil on canvas + 1,45 x 1,13 m + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Painting: oil on canvas, Scultures: Plaster and recycled polystyrene, paint and wood. Variable dimensions. Nueveochenta, Contemporary Art + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Mixed Media + 30 x 40 cm - 30 x 20 cm + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Mixed Media + 30 x 40 cm + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Painting: oil on canvas + 80 x 60 m + 2011.

Fiction for a Present Posture + Mixed Media + 30 x 40 cm + 2011.

Paintings and Sculptures Notebook 17 x 12 cm

This notebook offers a glance over my inquietudes about the matter in question through painting and sculpturing. Here details, sketches, and signaling of some works are collected. Either it is oil or plaster, each one registers the experience of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;doingâ&#x20AC;? printing in its malleable density the intention of the moment. Through an uncertain process, the matter grasps itself in a circular gesture which repeats itself and knots. A tissue made of instants which suggest a narrative: a space or a volume, a landscape or a body. In painting, the living presence of the gesture involves the glance and constructs a space in which rejoices. Just as a projection to the infinite, the color vibration generates a dynamic which evokes the presence of something only apprehensible there, in the inside of the painting. In the sculpture, the mass searches for modeling when it tries to suggest a corporeal landscape in touch with the furniture. Despite of its static and almost lithic presence these unshaped bodies wait for taking shape sitting in a chair, just like those who wish for assuming and getting aware of their own posture. In a game of distances, of closeness and farness, of insinuations and visions this notebook suggests a way to get closer to the charming of the mass and color. A poetical fiction which makes visible the spiritual framework nature uses to connect us with.

Conting Stones in the Garden of my House + “Actions of Faith” + Porcelain Museo de Arte de Caldas, Manizales + 2010

Stones and painting have something in common: the ancestral and basic in the history of earth and man. Stones own the planet’s memory on their composition, given their nature it seems eternal and immovable as container of time. In painting history of human spirit is tracked, as a first attempt of communication which keeps its internal essence as founder language. In a ritual action, I picked up porcelain rocks in order to trace a path to the painting. Little piles of precariously balanced rocks recall the ancestral act of stacking one rock atop another to delineate one’s territory and to make an offering in a sacred place. An act of faith that seeks to re-establish the harmony lost in the fragility of the artificial. This path takes me through some fragments of landscapes, which dispose themselves as furniture to observe the environment. Sculptures which make evident their modeling with random colors and gestural texture, disturbing in the obviousness and confusion of their bun. A shelter, a ladder and some lodges compound this topography and invite us to go through the panorama. At the end, a big landscape appears in a semicircle at the bottom of the room. Thirteen paintings, thirteen tones and thirteen rhythms compound a new architecture in the space with the objective of involving in the curve gesture the glance in the constant flowing of nature. The act of looking the light is evidenced with the two characters which in their extremes witness the beginning and the end of the day or better, the beginning and the end of the night, as if painting belongs to night where the inside makes itself visible despite of the landscape, in the exterior, charges its presence to daylight. The painting under the impossibility of registering the same light intensity of the landscape, suggests it in subtle rhythms when it captures the imperceptible fluorescence of the natural energies and vibrations which maybe in the night glares.

Conting Stones in the Garden of my House + “Actions of Faith” + Porcelain Museo de Arte de Caldas, Manizales + 2010

Conting Stones in the Garden of my House + Sans Titre + 145 x 113 cm + Oil on Canvas Museo de Arte de Caldas, Manizales + 2010

Delineating Topographies Bosque de la china and Blue exit were a displacement of drawing to sculpturing, to delineate paths for different gestural moments of the line and matter. The graphic moment extends on space, surrounding shapes and revealing surfaces. Granite tracks which models the plaster, the paper, the resin or the wood, compounding a dry garden where the rocky and watery prevails as melancholic elements of an interior landscape. Bosque de la china title of mi grade project in Paris retakes the place of a lullaby “in wood in China, I Chinese girl got lost…” geographical reference, imprecise and distant, which invites to submerge in the ambiguity of an remote image. The condition of getting lost is present before the disappearing of the horizon line in the inside of the forest. Blue exit purposes the possibility of the blue as a metaphor of escaping. Being this a practically absent color in the sample, refers to the immense extensions of the landscape: the sky and the ocean which transfuse in the blue the essence of the infinite. These two projects make evident the search of geographical references to delineate gardens where the drawing constancy was the tool to project an own topography. Here the insistence of the stroke, a restless instinct, remains the difficulty to move. The atmospheres of the present become into the plot and the elements of nature emerge in the gestural rhythms of the line. Between the fluency and the clumsiness these chains suggest equilibrium and presage a displacement. Regular plots, compulsive lines and stains of color dance to corporeal rhythms. A shivering covering reveals the interior presence of each object. Soft and malleable materials get undone and stratified. Sedimentary cuts build the shape revealing interior relieves. Shapes which look like being in imbalance because of the assembling with improbable skirting board, tension which rises for the apparent fragility of the stroke’s inscription over the sculpture. Objects which evoke pictorial elements belonging to the landscape, compounding in this way the acknowledgeable topography. Inspirited in the eastern gardens, I tried to highlight the apparent and ephemera fragility of the landscape. This installation does not allow seeing the totality of the pieces in just one look, but it invites to contemplation through the march to a new universe revealed by the pencil. A garden is revealed in the galley, a landscaping stenography proposes a way whose travel is marked by the ritual of the sediment drawing over poodles of solidified plaster. Alternating different media, works befall in the mounting. Through the prolongation of space, the in movement glance goes among the pieces, in order to lead in the melancholic intimacy of a geometrical shape “á la lumière forte du soleil” and the vaporous elevation of a stripped column “maelstrom” The drawing is thinking aillers (somewhere else) through time, line after line, dot after dot an ideas enchaining which crosslink without any of them persisting. The line is faltering, clumsy, stubborn; it displaces, gets obsessed, and gets over; tries the terrain through a cartographic instinct. It gets closer to sculpture, it involves it.

Blue exit + General view + 2009

Sans Titre, landscaping furniture + Blue Exit + Scupltures in recycled polystyrene and plaster Variables Dimensions + 2009

Sans Titre + Blue exit + Mixed Media on paper + 200 x 103 cm + 2009

Blue Exit is an installation comprised of sketches drawn on drops of plaster lying on the floor. A collaborative drawing, with multiple expressions, made up of a fragile and inaccessible terrain, where the rocky and the watery prevail as melancholic elements of an austere landscape. The title of the piece suggests a pathway and exit toward the blue of the sky or of oceans, whose hue hides the depth contained in these elements. Even though the oceans and the sky seem far away, Blue Exit takes over the space with an already settled surface, dry and ash-colored, to remind us of the threat of the earthly fragility close at hand.

RĂo. Blue exit + Installation on the floor + Graphite and Plaster + dimensiones variables + 2009

Melancholia + Graphite and Wood + 110 x 80 x 80 cm + 2008 + Paris

General View + Forest of China + Ecole National Superieur de Beaux-Arts + Gallery Gauche + 2009

“The Stranger Songs” I + Mixed Media on Paper + 200 x 113 cm + 2009 + Paris

“Forest of China” + Installation Detail + Wood and Paint + 2009 + Paris

“Paramo seco” + Wood + Variable Dimensions + 2009 + Paris

General View + Forest of China + Ecole National Superieur de Beaux-Arts + Gallery Gauche + 2009

Sans Titre, Varengeville s.Mer + Digital Photography + 31 x 47 cm + 2009 + France

En tierra, hilando vientos is a drawing done between Bogotá and Manizales, Colombia. It is a landscape woven with the rhythm of the trip, done at the pace of the day and the pace of all the other winds that pass through one’s mind. The drawing unites the paths of the weaving of atmospheric variations where the aerial forms are condensed into imaginary coincidence. The Torre de Herveo (Herveo aerial tower in the postcard image) is one remnant of the wrecked and ruined modernity in Colombia. It is the main tower of the aerial cable car built to cross the Herveo canyon within the Andes central mountain range in Colombia, connecting the western and eastern valleys of the Andean range by means of an aerial cable line.

“On land, Weaving Winds” + Artist’s Book, Ed 150 + 15 x 10 cm Card Postal, Picture taked by Orlando Castañeda in 1978 Herveo Tolima.

The Illusion of Floating + Installation in situ in Painting + Oil on Wood + Variables Dimensions Nueveochenta, Art Contemporary + General view + 2007 + Bogotรก

The pictorial illusion on three-dimensional surfaces creates a landscape where the viewer is able to move amongst the pieces. Cubic fragments of urban materials flow, slide, and sink. The ground softens and undulates like a sea that emerges from a minimalist and disquieting landscape. Harmony between appearances and simulations issue forth from the gallery floor. Motionless remnants that in their inherent falseness remind us of the edge. A limit that the painting itself overcomes. I used trompe-lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;oeil to reproduce the different textures on urban materials. I also extended the wood grain of the floor and lifted some boards to give a watery appearance to the solid surface. This project brings to mind the fragility of contemporary landscapes, of poetic appearance and tragic meaning, and the breaking of waves recalls the latent risk of the polar ice caps melting and the oceans rising. The three-dimensional ruins of urban materials lay about like remnants of a razing of the space.

The Illusion of Floating + Installation in situ in Painting + Oil on Wood + Variables Dimensions Nueveochenta, Art Contemporary + General view + 2007 + Bogotรก

Presence + Digital Photography + 30 x 40 cm. + 2007 + Bogotรก

The white cube is the minimalist figure par excellence, stark and abstract, free from nostalgia. Being the pure presence of a three-dimensional geometric shape, it is a metaphor of the current representational space invented by modernity to isolate each work of art from its immediate surroundings. It prevents the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gaze from being distracted to beyond the work of art. In the photography project Presencia, a white cube floats atop the water. This shape does not contain the image, but rather it is found within the piece itself. Its stark presence brings new significance to the landscape in which it is immersed, drawing oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention from the interior of the image to the exterior of the cube. The white cube functions as a reflecting device for the surface on which it floats. Exposed to the currents, its presence flows like a referent in the moving river.

Presence + Digital Photography + 30 x 40 cm. + 2007 + BogotĂĄ

Atados + Photography 35 mm + 90 x 60 cm. + 2008 + Paris

“SOUVENIR, en tiempos distantes” + Video Installation Variables Dimensiones + 8 Digital Photographies Nueveochenta, Contemporary Art. Bogotá.

Panorama directs the glance of the spectator to the expositive space through the installation of first sights of BogotĂĄ city at the galleriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; floor. The aerial distance allows abstracting and converging as well in the map as in the landscape. This glance glorifies and undresses the atmosphere of a city inside of black clouds. Urban layout which vanishes in the dark granite surface of the exposition place.

“Panorama” + Intervention in paint on the floor of Gallery + Variables Dimensiones Fundation Cu4rto Nivel. + 2006 + Bogotá.

The usage of painting in this project does not have referential codes, more than being the illusion of the surface in which it lies. The deepness of the image lies on being the same which is under, opening a meditating formal space to visual details which painting proposes when it tracks in colors. It is an invitation for the spectator to delight on the surfaces of a neutral space, where the image goes through unnoticed and takes the glance out of its physical limitations. Painting, lacking of frames and determined boundaries, behaves as extension and expansion. In the pictorial creation I attempted the image to substitute the object, as a prolongation or track, becoming this into an exercise to keep observing.

In this unfinished time, I can keep awaiting to reach the zero distance, the one between the object and its image, between red and green, between the imperceptible white shadows. “In Paint” + Installation in Painting + Variables Dimensiones + 2005. Project Room + Universidad de los Andes. Bogotá.

Instalación interactiva.+ Proyecto de grado Especialización Creación Multimedia. + Trabajo colectivo. Rodrigo Facundo, Natalia Díaz, Nelson Ramón, Juanita Carrasco, Natalia Castañeda, Dimensiones variables + 2006. + Bogotá.

“Un enemigo a derrotar” + Colective Project Adriana Pineda - Natalia Castañeda + Video’s Still Residency BATISCAFO + La Habana, Cuba + 2006

“A la deriva” + Happening in Publique space in La Havana 100 Free distribution serigraphies + 2006 + Proyecto Batiscafo, La Habana, Cuba.

My interest in landscapes comes from the seduction of the adjoining reality and its endless beauty. The landscape is the subjective interpretation man does of the environment which surrounds him, relationship established through a glance. This glance encompasses the contemplation of the atmosphere as well as acknowledge of the geographic importance of territory, as the place one belongs and identifies. This means, not only think about territory from pictures, but also, attempt to achieve transversal lectures from cartography, as a work method which allows us to go deeper in the several possibilities of getting along with our territory. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Territorios sin tiempoâ&#x20AC;? + Oil on wood + 30 x 260 cm + 2005 + BogotĂĄ.

“Alrededores” + OIl on wood + 15 cm X 150 cm + 2006 + Bogotá.

Commons Territories Details

It is an expedition through memory to landscapes formerly known and experienced by others. A journal in search of wandering and acknowledging fields without having to displace, just through the appreciations of those whom in a past dwelt such lands. Being the memory the journal of our trip, we can rebuild and relocate territories already dwelt and most of all already experienced. Places called from the affection, which remember the significance of earth in the creation and construction of identity. This journal which begins the interchange of stories and images of the places of origin of diverse people, besides filing up and doing a journal diary, it procures to do a cartography which allows reconstruct by the mean of paintings, inter-medium spaces tilting oscillating inside of the past and the present. Representations which evoke a particular imaginary, symbolic constructions and collective metaphors which becomes common for many people. In this way, the spectator assumes the job of the cartographer and traveler, who creates his own rutes, revealing different ways of access, finding shores and known landscapes which takes him to travel inside his own memory, revealing so new geographies. The traveler is the one who really pays attention to the geographic space, enjoys the course and has time for contemplation. His selfless gaze falls in love with the landscape without cause or object, just for the simple joy of appreciating the beauty of another sensitive space, a harmonious presence compound out of geological and architectonic phenomena, which does not say anything different from what it really is, but involves the glance into an internal atmosphere.

“Commons Territories” + General view + Oil and Graphite on wood + Variables Dimensions Aprox 140 pièces + 2004 - 2006 + Bogotá.