Uxia Painting

Informed by cinematic traditions and photo chemical processes, Carmen Valerio's work is an adventure in narrative and motion through the expression of colour and texture, while working on each large canvas as if it were a single photographic frame of film. An artist who experiments with different methods of production by applying and layering paint and paste to a surface with a variety of tools, alternately emphasising or suppressing traces of her touch, to create abstracted images and allowing emerging new forms to reveal de-familiarised, sculptural and tactile qualities. This process-led practice began in the darkroom, texturising imagery by experimenting with chemicals, surfaces and historical printing methods, manipulating the photographic process to create abstracted images, photograms and collage. The project determines the medium used as she seeks to give form to thought, to question aesthetics and social assumptions, stirred by the incessant emergence of new questions about art in all its forms and possibilities. A practice is situated between documented facts, oral histories, chance observations and figments of the imagination.