Yolanda del Riego. Recent Works (1999)

 EXHIBITION: Yolanda del Riego. Recent Works (1999)

The work of Yolanda del Riego is a frontier work. Its interest and importance are based on its surpassing the limits. For a creator, it is always a fascinating game of knowing you are a few steps further here, a few steps further there; it is always fascinating to not know exactly what the coordinates are.

Yolanda del Riego constructs works that extend beyond the limits of technique and beyond the limits of what is in sight. Or towards us over here, depending on where we position ourselves with regards to the frontier.

For this creator, everything emerges as a result of the long years in which she studied and worked on printmaking techniques with Toshi Yoshida, Lee Chesney, Clinton Cline, Jules Heller, Misch Kohn... great printmaking masters of our century. But Yolanda sets forth from them and advances the concept of "evolving edition" of Kohn’s: those editions in which different works arise from the same plate.

In this process we must keep in mind the artist's loyalties to her transgressions. Loyalties: to continue using the etching press as a primary tool for the creation of her work; to continue using the plate and its elaborated surface from which to structure the composition. Loyalty, in short, to long years of learning and dedication; to the lessons learned from great masters.

But in all these works we can appreciate the transgression of orthodoxy. But this does not mean a step towards heterodoxy but rather to a new, different, and personal field. Because the print, painstakingly made, becomes the surface on which papers, fabrics, paint, pencil lines, overlap and intersect to take us to new latitudes. In Yolanda del Riego the techniques accumulate, they overlap, they become fierce, they are enhanced, to lead us to spaces of meticulous and precise nuance. Yolanda del Riego leads us beyond the limits of technique.

And beyond, in turn, the limits of what is in sight. We could say that the artist is a landscaper. We could say that each work of hers is an open window to memories. So many years living in virgin colorful lands of the Caribbean, ...so many years delving into the depths of lavishly brash nature, create, or rather created, in the artist an unforgettable substrate, dynamic, in which nature —trees and spaces, colors, plains and mountains, cold and vegetation, skies and storms, clouds and rains— is an essential part of feeling.

And in the patient elaboration of each work, inevitably, this substrate arises, the memory arises, the experience that has marked an indelible sensation. Landscape, landscapes of memory that lead us to the limits of what is in sight: nothing is concrete, nothing is real, nothing is recognizable. Everything arises from the remotest corner of emotion and everything transpires between reality and abstraction, between emotion and passion.