Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda
Catalina in the Studio with with works in various stages of completion. She’s holding a small figurative sculpture that is going to be placed inside the painting behind it.
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda was born in Malaga, raised in the Canary Islands, Spain and currently lives and works in Hudson, New York. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, NY (2014) and a BFA from Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA (2005).
Viejo’s work has been included in numerous galleries and museums including; HallSpace, Boston, MA; ProtoGomez Gallery, New York, NY; A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Panacea Museum, Bedford, U.K; TSA, Brooklyn, NY; GP Presents, New York, NY; Bronx Art Space, Bronx, NY and The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA.
Her work has been covered by publications including; Art Maze Magazine U.K, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Artscope Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and Vanity Fair Italia. She was awarded Best in Show Gold by Rujeko Hockley for her work in Wide Open 6, BWAC, Brooklyn, NY and has been the recipient of full Fellowships by the Jentel Arts Residency Program in WY and the Saltonstall Artist Residency Program in NY.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
The physical process of making my work goes through various stages. I begin with a lot of sketching. These sketches are unsophisticated, borderline goofy. Still, I make many of them, and they help me get a clearer idea of how to compose an image. I will then research online or photograph figures, objects, and landscapes. Once I have gathered all the pictures for my composition, I collage them together in photoshop. I will then create drawings, paintings, animations, and sculptures from these photoshop collages. Focusing on the same images but working in different media allows me to convey different perspectives. It keeps me on my toes, never allowing myself to become too comfortable with a particular medium or form of representation.
The psychological and emotional process of making my work is different from my physical process. Whereas the physical process often follows a set of steps, the conceptual process is continuously seesawing. My memories, dreams, experiences of female intimacy, and existential questions influence my images. I am interested in psychoanalysis, and I meditate regularly. In my meditations, I dive into my subconscious and encounter images, messages, and different representations of myself. My future self presents me with insights. My wild self delivers objects to me, and my younger self gives me gifts, all of which I then bring up to my conscious world and filter into my paintings.
In the Studio. Showing drawings and a small diorama on the left.
My dreams are always highly physical and centered around the body. The following two dreams successfully capture the emotions and feelings I go through as I create my work. In the first dream, I was walking around some generic city. Suddenly, between the buildings, I saw a massive burst of color. It was a beautiful rainbow. On the sidewalk, I overheard a salesperson speaking to a potential buyer. I heard the salesperson say that if the buyer didn't want a rainbow, they could choose "stormy clouds" or a "sunset" instead. Confused, I approached further. The rainbow I had just witnessed was a hologram projected into the sky by a company that was developing "natural technology." With the press of a button, one could launch realistic natural phenomena into the sky. The technology was so good that it was impossible to recognize the real natural phenomena amongst the fake. I felt helpless as I tried to warn excited buyers about the dangers of not differentiating between reality and illusion. As I pleaded, bursts of rainbows beamed in the sky, one after the other.
In the second dream, I saw a fish on the ground while walking on the beach. It was still alive but slowly asphyxiating due to lack of water. Overcome with panic, I picked the fish up, and after a desperate search, I found a bucket of water and dropped him in. Feeling relieved, I watched him as I began to notice something strange; his scales were dissolving off his body, appearing like colorful bursts of ink. The fish started to jolt in the water, and his body ruptured. I realized, to my helplessness, that I had placed him in boiling water, and I was cooking him alive. I felt guilty, deeply saddened, and had an overwhelming sense of hopelessness as I observed the beautiful colors from his scales swirl and glisten in the water.
In these dreams, my feelings of helplessness combined with my ability to notice the beauty during disturbing events are the same feelings that constantly filter into my work. My desire to help and bring awareness to others, my sense of failure to do so, my feelings of anxiety and loss of control are in an ongoing duel with the moments in which I experience the beauty around me and a sense of surrender to a situation. There is a moment within the chaos where I pause, appreciate the positive no matter how small, and let go. This constant fluctuation between moments of wanting to control vs. acceptance all merge and translate into my artistic process as I create my images.
What are you working on at the moment?
Dealing with a persistent virus, social injustices, and climate disasters that are causing global disruption has instigated a new direction in my work, with the central theme being Self Care. This new body of work has spread across various mediums, including; drawing, painting, sculpture, dioramas, collage, photography, and animation, but thematically they all overlap.
It has been interesting to see the groups of women that appeared in my previous work disappear, leaving behind a single woman in isolation in each of these new works. The voyeuristic qualities that have permeated my work have moved from private to public spaces. The women in these images have developed a symbiotic relationship with the landscape. The female figures embody the wild woman archetype and reflect the landscape around them: arms open up like flowers, legs mirror river bends, bottoms mimic distant hills. The repetition of natural elements, like leaves or waves, evokes a sense of abundant beauty and simultaneously remains on the verge of overflowing and consuming the figures.
Balance, Mixed Media Diorama, Approx. 20” x 24” x 15”, 2021
As I create these drawings, paintings, dioramas, and most recently, animations, I rely on nature's beauty, poetics, and sensuality. It allows me to counteract the uneasy feelings I experience concerning my existential questions and anxieties about the future. There is always a moment of tension in my images, which fluctuates between pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability, life and death. The woman in my works embraces these dichotomies, the possible danger, the fear, the futility. She is aware that she is a part of the seasons of life; birth, change, decay, regeneration. Stripped off material possessions, social relationships, and facial recognition, these women show us the value of being human and remind us that our natural environment is inextricably weaved into the fabric of our existence.
My photography project titled "Selfhood" also depicts a single unrecognizable female figure stripped of material possessions and relationships. In these images, I have also removed a sense of time and place. What elements of identity are ineradicable? What characteristics, relations, possessions can one sacrifice and continue to consider oneself real? The figure in these photographs has entered a liminal state on the boundaries of selfhood and dissolution. As I work on these images, I keep asking myself if the construction of these environments is a way to escape a difficult reality. I then am reminded that a dream is always on the edge of a nightmare.
The female figures in all these works have become an inspiration for how I would like to live my life: confident, trusting, in a state of surrender and acceptance. During this pandemic and times of uncertainty, the theme of self-care feels not only relevant but urgently important. We have no control over our environment or the actions of others, but we do have a choice in how we respond. At this time, we need self-compassion, self-balance, and self-awakening the most. I believe this is a time when each one of us needs to adjust our humanity before we can extend it to the rest of the world.
Can you talk about how and why you came up with the idea to create a painting that opens?
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda
The Light Collectors, 2017.
Acrylic, silicone, plaster, wire, thread & paper on wood hinged.
36 x 72 x 5 inches, (91.44 x 182.88 x 12.7 cm) open.
Before working on the multi-paneled paintings, I experimented with collage, book arts, and paintings that broke away from the traditional rectangular formats. While I was at Hunter for my MFA, I was able to experiment, and I made some very strange and, at times, bad works. Still, they were crucial in helping me figure out the development of the multi-paneled paintings.
To those who have never seen my work, my multi-paneled paintings require viewer participation. They consist of hinged wooden panels which viewers can open and close. Polyptych paintings can be traced back to the Renaissance. Artists such as Jan van Eyck, Matthias Grunewald, and Hieronymus Bosch all worked with multi-layered panels that required opening to experience the entire painting. While their paintings were composed of one or two moveable panels and the formal qualities emphasized religious imagery, my paintings depict my personal experiences by opening multiple doors, one inside the other.
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda
The Light Collectors, 2017.
Acrylic, silicone, plaster, wire, thread & paper on wood hinged.
36 x 48 x 10 inches (91.44 x 121.92 x 25.4 cm) closed
The doors act like a physical body being opened and a psychological passageway into how I feel and what I think. The paintings encourage the viewers' impulsive, voyeuristic tendencies. By closing and opening the various panels, the viewer changes the painting's arrangement and thus alters the narrative. The individual's experience and engagement with the painting induces an awareness of their own body, movements, and behaviors. The viewer opens, closes, pushes, and pulls various moving parts of the paintings, mirroring the figures depicted in the scenes, which are themselves looking, touching, and probing the body parts of other figures. Whether a willing or an unwilling participant, the viewer becomes a key component in allowing the narrative of the painting to unfold, which encourages an evolving story rather than one single captured moment.
Recently, I have been cutting holes into my paintings and placing sculptures inside. The two-dimensional surface breaks into the three-dimensional world: a figure's sculptural hand squeezes the breast of another, a flat painting includes a sculpted pelvis with a bird nesting between the labia, shooting stars squirt out of breasts but also push forward in space through their physicality. "The Light Collectors" was the first structure in which I merged a multi-paneled painted composition with 3d sculpture inside and continues to inform recent work. I enjoy forcing these mediums to live together. The paintings look flat from afar. The viewer often assumes something about the work, and up close, the 3-dimensional components force a slower read. These visual illusions aim to distort the viewers' perception of space, reality, and sensory experience. Nothing is ever what it seems.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
My images re-invent themes that have interested me all of my life: reality and illusion, voyeuristic impulses, our relationship with our environment, and existential dichotomies. I often use the rainbow in my work as a symbol of inner light and connection. Visual art, poetry, literature, mythology, psychology, philosophy, nature, and daily interactions with my environment and other beings influence my art-making.
Venus, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 11” x 14”, 2021.
In terms of visual art references, space divisions and the landscape in Indian miniature painting inform my work. I am drawn to how the landscape is stacked and looks like it's going to topple over itself. I think of the craftsmanship and meticulous detail in Albrecht Dürer and Odilon Redon's noir drawings which evoke dreamy and nightmarish qualities. I think of Marisol's sculptures' boldness and confidence, the sensuality in Alina Szapocznikow's works, and the humor in Ella Kruglyanskaya’s drawings and paintings.
I often make direct references in my work and pay homage to artworks that inspire me. In my works titled "Venus," a nude female figure stands in a museum room as milk shoots out from her breasts towards the encased little Venus of Willendorf and drips down the glass. Did the little fertility Venus evoke a lactating spurt from the figure? Or is the figure trying to awaken the little twenty-five-thousand-year-old fertility Venus, who has been removed from her environment and is now confined in a sterile case?
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
Pre pandemic, I used to travel to NYC at least once a month from Hudson. I used to visit galleries and museums and developed a routine which I enjoyed very much. After the pandemic, I had to figure out new ways of accessing art. Although art online was available before the pandemic, I feel it is now more accessible than ever; the resolution of images has improved, I have noticed more virtual gallery walks, and museums and galleries have incorporated new ways of experiencing works online. It is also exciting to check out an exhibition in Madrid, a museum show in London, and an artist's studio in New York, all on the same day. Having that kind of access while being stuck inside was an immense outlet. It kept me inspired and made me feel connected. Of course, nothing replaces seeing art in person, and I look forward to resuming my art viewing trips. Still, I am grateful for the art community's efforts in expanding access to art online during this time.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I will be exhibiting some of my collage work for the Mohawk Hudson Regional Exhibition at the Albany Art Center in September, curated by Alisa Sikelianos-Carter. I will also be participating in a group exhibition at M Street Gallery in Jersey City at the end of the year. The exhibit will focus on artists who merge painting with 3d elements, and I will be showing several of my paintings.
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda’S work is included in our show “Illuminated,” July 9th - Aug. 30th, 2021. Visit her Instagram (@catalinaviejo) and website http://www.catalinaviejo.com to see more of her work.