Teresa Currea Colombia, b. 1985

The Work of Teresa Currea

Eduardo Serrano

For Teresa Currea, paper is what canvas is to painters and, despite its fragility, is also what bronze or stone is to sculptors. It is not just the raw material of her works, but also the productive element of her images; the foundation from which the rest of her fantastic compositions originate. Her work will move you to utopic worlds; worlds of dreams where birds and flowers, mushrooms and astronauts mesh so as to guide the observer to improbable worlds, at the same time enabling one's own imagination to fly.   

Her works are generally small in size, but they are hardly related to traditional miniatures in either the materials used or their intention. Far from being decorative, they aim at encouraging ideas or visions in your mind, at interrupting daily thoughts and allowing the viewer to get carried away by the meaning of their own contemplations.

If paper is her support, drawing is the medium that allows the embodiment of her fiction, the suggestion of some kind of fable through which she expresses her own reveries. Through them, she is also able to indirectly touch on some of her artistic values, like her view of aesthetics as a crucial requisite, and of the artist's freedom to follow a path counter to the conventional values - those that have been established, as well as those of vanguard. 

Her work is close to surrealism as it establishes the practice of freedom of thought without an apparent intervention of reason, and also because it relies on a form of association in which the unconscious is the tool that generates a significant number of the images. The serendipity of meaning, and even the dreams - as is the case with surrealism - are the source of her works. The use of collage, as well as incongruent objects - also like surrealism -comprise a good part of her images. 

Yet, many of Teresa Currea's collages are more like assemblages since the artist cuts out figures to place them in a three-dimensional composition inside acrylic boxes, hence creating scenes that - once the viewer has entered these representations, into the bizarre worlds they represent - become a kind of showcase. Inside them parade primarily the vision of the artist, then those of the viewer. The objects are not selected randomly; the artist meticulously chooses elements belonging to electric network circuits, like light bulbs and switches, possibly creating an allusion to the fact that circuits consistently return to their point of origin. 

Some scenes depict plants and animals, especially jellyfish, coral, crustaceans, and even divers who epitomize their fondness for the sea. Also depicted are objects that frequently have little in common with other elements in the scene, but for that very reason convey the idea of coexistence (a principle that is perfectly exemplified by the parasitic mushrooms which scrounge on other beings) and that also serve as a main theme in her work. Human beings also make an appearance, albeit not always whole but frequently half-hidden by some strange rash, by some outgrowth that isn't exactly an animal, nor is it a plant, but rather some other type of fungus or jellyfish that for unknown reasons conceals the human physiognomy. The artist's images however, are not ominous or threatening. On the contrary, they project an aura of innocence and of fairy tales. To this end, the use of pastel colors consistently represents an artistic breath of fresh air during these times of complex and numerous technologies, and so many fateful messages about life on this planet.