Edward Shaw
Viviana Zargón investigates the dimensions of dichotomy in her work, and her work is an accurate reflection of her life or viceversa. But with Viviana, fragmentation can become the path to totality, there is no harmony without division, no construction without confrontation. In the process of fractioning, Zargón complements and completes. Her life has been an accumulation of changes and transitions; her work a two – way trip, an attempt to compose opposites, conjugate divergent truths, unite two facets of a same reality.
The composition of Zargón’s work is always divided in two segments. After seeing several series, one becomes aware of the recurrent image of a bed as the leading protagonist, a bed on wich the place of the pillow is often occupied by a photograph the artist has taken and then painted onto canvas. This is the space for dreams in Zargón’s work, where the past and the future join in simultaneous sequence.
Zargón continuously cites the past and the present in her work. She says, “Everything that occurs is in function of what is to come, without losing what once was... My search takes me back into painting’s history and into its lasting quality. Technological innovation fascinates me. My own history, however, makes me a painter. At this point in time, I have no desire to incorporate new elements, like, for example, digital photographs.”
Zargón collects contrasts. She initiated her life with an innocent search for self – sufficiency as an artist. At nine she began to frequent workshops, dividing – as she so often does – her energy between painting and music. At 14 she decided to devote herself to painting, which for her was a way to express herself outside of her body, producing something that could remain with a life of its own, separate from herself.
Then circumstances tore her from the tranquil life of painting in workshops, and she found herself living in Barcelona for six years. There she began a new life. She focussed on minimalism, leaving her original expressionism for an attitude of “shedding things”, of reducing what she had poured onto her canvasses.
She started to divide her imaginery; she devised her bed – format, where, in the place of the pillow, she deposited the residue of her dreams, and in the place of blankets, the texture of an already wrinkled life. She absorbed the graphicness and the composition of Mark Rothko in her attitude toward painting.
She also decided to include the mathematical as well as the emotional. She began to concentrate on involving contrasting combinations in her work – words with symbols, landscapes and abstractions, geometry and texture, history and ideas. She began to fragment even the structure of a painting itself, cutting each work into several narrow slices.
After this long road, we arrive at her current work: a detail of a photo taken in a crane in the port which stands above a beehive of geometric formulas or tables borrowed from some obscure science, repeated on four or five long panels of canvas. She remains true to her original objective: divide to unify.