Karla Tobar Abarca

Karla Tobar Abarca’s series of Twisted Paintings incorporates multiple levels of meaning that she has been exploring throughout her artistic career. The symbiosis between art and technology is exemplified in her paintings, where the artist rescues technology and reinvents a pictorial language that is in tune with the sensorial, such as vision and touch. The images used in these suspended works were retrieved from scanned images by the artist and a group of collaborators who walked around the streets of various cities with a scanner in their backpacks; this was documented in the video also included in this gallery. The end result is a number of tactile images created by these mobile scanning devices that the artist reinterpreted into abstract forms using sheets of plastic. Winding and bending these soft malleable panels and adding somber lighting to highlight their material folds, the Twisted Paintings embody the fragmented image realized through the performative and bodily gesture.