The Abundance That Disappears
Three monochrome wall frescoes structure the two gallery spaces: For her spatial installations, Carolina Pérez Pallares works directly with ink and plaster applied to the walls. Onto and between these surfaces, she places individual paintings as well as works made of plaster and paper. The wall pieces thus also serve as carriers, hosting new relief structures. Fragile, vitrine-like sculptures are distributed throughout the space. Covered with a fine layer of yellow chalk dust, they themselves act as carriers for delicate works on paper.
The colors blue, red, yellow, and green, along with shades of white, form the foundation of Carolina Pérez Pallares’ work, as do the materials she uses: ink, dye, chalk, and plaster. The four colors are overlaid with layers of white, shaping new chromatic spaces. Through these layers, subtle tonal gradations emerge, creating an absorbing sense of depth that gives the pictorial space a three-dimensional quality.
Carolina Pérez Pallares develops an expanded concept of painting: she breaks painting down into its components, dismantles it, and reassembles it on site in a fragmented interplay between the space itself and all its elements. Her artistic practice applies layer upon layer, crafting a non-figurative narrative from fragments and an archive of fleeting snapshots that open up associative visual worlds.
In this exhibition, she focuses on a reduced presentation with an emphasis on a tactile approach. The individual materials settle into the space like almost tangible layers, creating a moment of stillness and concentration. The installation format enables a physical closeness to the various surfaces and objects, encouraging viewers to engage with them from different perspectives in order to perceive the complexity of the surfaces from multiple distances.
Following the same principle as the fresco surfaces, small plaster works and overpainted photographs are created. In the process, layers overlap, colors are reduced, and elements of the images fade from the abundance and become translucent – allowing the underlying layers and the original composition of the photographs to remain perceptible.
The selection of photographs offers insight into the artist’s biographical references, her handling of light and composition, and her approach to playing with formal and chromatic contrasts.
In her work, Carolina Pérez Pallares fuses an engagement with painterly traditions, the fine tonal gradations of Renaissance fresco techniques, and the beginnings of abstraction. She dissects painting into its components, deconstructs the interplay of its elements to reposition them and allow for individual interpretation.
As a playful counterpoint to the sensitively layered and formally reduced works stand her narrative titles. In them lies a poetry of the surreal, bearing a deep seriousness. These cryptic to poetic fragments of sentences complement the visual restraint of the works and add a layer of self-inquiry—into both the process itself and into existence.
Lissy Würzl, 2025
