Rouge-Noir

The gaze of Vanessa Velib manifests itself without the need to refer to specific places, choosing instead to transform her work into a sphere of dialogue with the most common codes: the alphabet with a succulent density created by the impasto that suggests matter, where the compositions invite sensual touch—a fundamental and constant element in her work.

Velib establishes a communion with nature by rejecting conventions and discovering a personal language to achieve her goal. She accomplishes this through the use of color saturation and thick, marked outlines, thus creating a network of forms that possess meaning in themselves.

There is a swift, violent, and forceful treatment, with an urgent sense of change and metamorphosis. This is a style known as all over painting, where there is no prior idea of composition, nor a difference between figure and ground; where each element can be confused with the whole, in a space without neutral or empty areas. Rapid brushstrokes, impastos, and wide strips of color integrated in various directions can be distinguished, confirming the artist’s interest in suggesting—more than the experience of nature—the nature of the act of painting itself.

In her work, we find echoes of Abstract Expressionism, with stylistic correspondences to Gorky, Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, and Kline—all of them manifesting the improvised states of the unconscious through brushstrokes and paint drips. With these gestures, Velib decisively seduces towards the importance of abstract movement, proposing a generous materiality where a center of gravity is constructed, sustained by the sumptuous color that affirms it as a visual metaphor.

Related to action painting, Vanessa Velib takes up the extraordinary freedoms of forms and colors, impastos and scrapings, objects or subjects that she incorporates into her compositions, appearing as bodies in continuous metamorphosis.