Artist: Mónica Heller
Exhibition title: Un paisaje que no es un paisaje [A landscape that is not a landscape]
Venue: PIEDRAS, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Date: November 12, 2021 – February 20, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and PIEDRAS, Buenos Aires
Un paisaje que no es un paisaje [A landscape that is not a landscape] is Heller’s third solo exhibition at PIEDRAS gallery and consists of a group of 25 paintings made between 2019 and 2021, along with 3D and 2D animation videos. The paintings and animations laterally surround a certain idea of an extensible landscape: a traversable landscape, scenes that expand and grow. Outdoor, indoor, imaginary, artificial and digital landscapes.
Mónica Heller (b. 1975, Buenos Aires) has focused her practice of the last 15 years on video, mainly in the development of complex 2D and 3D animations in which she deploys dense narratives, mediated by anthropomorphic characters and objects placed in relation to the surrounding symbolic world.
Her characters derived from fairy tales or fables accept adult roles in complex relationships that link the spectator with close representations in a constant displacement of meaning. The essential resources of her work come from the transaction between fantastic imagery as a means of interpretation and sublimation of the real as an elusive experience. She takes rhetorical elements and resources from cartoons, narrative painting, video games and comics, among others. Her work focuses on the emotional, social and existential impact of imageries traversed by the use of technology, the resources of amateur animation, DIY, CGI models of internet libraries, design and editing. Much of her practice is derived from the techniques of realisation and creation learning.