Valentina Eyzaguirre b. 1982 Chile, works mainly with wallpaper to make décollages; compositions that she creates by cutting, tearing or removing layers of paper. Her recent work is characterised by the use of ultramarine blue pigment in monochrome paintings on paper, on which she also makes hand-cut shapes. Valentina works from her studio in London since 2012.
My work is referencing walls - their construction and meaning. I am interested in how wall structures and surfaces serve to express ideas and emotions remaining as records of a specific time. I use building materials to make wall-like pieces that I break afterwards. So my work focuses on the process of building up and then tearing away through expressive gestures.
My interest in walls started when I found anonymous décollages - accumulated torn posters - on the street walls. I photographed small fragments of those large walls, loaded with thick layers of peeled paper forming intricate compositions, to make once enlarged images that allude to abstract expressionism paintings.
I move from capturing the anonymously torn posters of the city to making décollages in the studio - wallpaper décollages. Layers of wallpaper glued with wheat paste and then ripped. Seeking to perform the gesture of tearing found on the street walls, and experience the emotion of ripping off layers of paper firmly sticked together, breaking the accumulated patterns imprinted on the wallpapers.
Lately I have been adding layers of building materials used for wall construction like plaster, wood, aluminium and industrial paint. Sometimes I tear out the surface, other times I dig it out, unearthing the hidden patterns and meanings of our walls.
ON MOTHERHOOD
I was a new mother when I started making wallpaper décollages. Prior to that, I was using torn posters found on the streets. I translated those materials into elements of interior design; the wallpaper rolls replaced the posters. I was drawn to those printed papers that cover walls with attractive patterns. I immediately associated the definition of "pattern" to the daily routine of a mother's life.
I ripped off the paper in a kind of an emotional outburst. Sometimes the cuts were the consequence of an energetic almost violent gesture, others they were the result of a delicate, even meditative execution. While peeling off the layers of paper, abstract shapes suggesting the female body started to appear; forms and movements on paper with floral and damask motifs that to me speak about pregnancy, birth and motherhood. The beautiful and colourful blossoming of life mixed with the physical and psychological tearing that occurs through its different stages. Becoming a mother is a complex experience full of contradictions.
"A secret reality — the glory and horror of the birth experience itself, the joy and pain of pregnancy, the sense of entrapment that goes along with the satisfactions of giving life". (Judy Chicago, Birth Project, 1985)
BLUE STATEMENT
Experiences charge already known objects and places with new meaning.
That is what happened to the knowledge I had of the colour ultramarine blue, specifically of the International Klein Blue version, while participating in L’AiR Arts residency program. There in Montparnasse, where that particular version was created, it struck me in an intense way, as if I was seeing it for the very first time. Suddenly I was noticing it all around Paris, breathing the idea behind Yves Klein’s spiritual pursuit through his colour blue.
I have been a victim of that hypnotic blue hue... Does it have something to reveal to me, to us, to art? Something that I set myself to find out, and in the process I have been using ultramarine blue pigment to paint monochromes on paper, which I glue together and pierce afterwards. The shape of those holes represent organs. Abstract ultramarine blue organs made out of layers of torn paper.
That blue is the vehicle with which to navigate into yourself. That blue is the colour of home.
Blue is indeed the colour of our world. Blue is the colour of the sea and the sky. Blue represents the infinite and the great beyond. Blue is a sacred colour. Blue is the colour of memory, of dreams, of nostalgia.