Cynthia Kampelmacher

Place: Buenos Aires

Born: 1968

Biography:

Cynthia Kampelmacher is an Argentine artist born in Buenos Aires in 1968. She addresses image perception and memory as processes that affect subjectivity through her work, which revolves around the impossibility of mimetic representation. Her images may be considered abstract but are placed in a limit of vision that allows for the identification of a notion of topography or landscape. Kampelmacher takes the motif of the patterns formed by vegetation, generating infinite variations: her 'jungle tangles' refer to a vision of nature and landscape as the basic axis of the history of painting. She considers that landscape as a genre enables 'a kind of insistence, of different ways of approaching, of mapping, of trapping what is basically ungraspable.' In this insistence, the pieces are transformed into drawings, paintings, objects, installations and site-specific interventions that sensitize the gaze, altering the observer’s point of view and in turn promoting a reflection on what we see and the impossibility of a univocal and permanent answer. Among her procedures, she adopts transparency and tracing, the idea of placing a veil in front that conceptually hides and reveals the image, scratching and intervening directly on the images in some cases: these are different attempts to cross the image plane, or to emphasize the front or the back.