Suspension, evanescence, abstraction: these are the first sensations the sculptures of Isabel Alonso Vega evoke. The artist will present her works in Italy for the first time during her next solo show, Senza Fuoco, opening on January 19th at White Noise Gallery, Rome.

Her artworks are absolute and archetypical images, able to communicate on an unconscious level. The artist overlaps several plexiglass centrings painted with different techniques -sooth, gold leaf, acrylic- inside clear cases, giving the illusion of an ethereal suspension. The pieces on view focus on two specific shades: black and gold, evoking a sequential path towards enlightening through meditation.

The black clouds, created burning with live fire the different layers, are in dialogue with large-scale drawings, their two-dimensional ideal projection. Smoke columns, black holes or mysterious shadows embody the concept of unknown, taking the viewer to a dimension of pure contemplation.
Taking inspiration from the Late-Medieval text “The Cloude of Unknowyng”, Alonso Vega creates weightless structures that overtake language and comprehension, allowing the viewer to contemplate the ineffable.

The works of Isabel are a hybrid form of abstraction, whose references to understandable forms such as cells or clouds, are immediately lost in favour of a completely subliminal interpretation. Suspension and obsessive formal simplicity create an immediate fracture between meaning and signifier, creating a completely irrational form of communication.
One of the main needs driving her work is the will to create something universally recognizable as precious, so precious that it is able to generate what Kant defines “mathematical sublime”

In 1910, Vasilij Kandinskij entered his studio and got struck by a work accidentally hung upside down. What he saw was a perfect painting, irradiating an internal light, where he could finally only see forms and colours, free from any other meaning.
It took us centuries and several revolutions to recognize the importance of Abstract art, to understand its ability to communicate without using any clear term. The work of Isabel Alonso Vega seems to be moving in the same direction: monumental sculptures without any mass, able to give form to the evanescence.

Isabel Alonso Vega was born in Madrid in 1969. Currently she lives and works between Madrid and Berlin.

She graduated in 1991 with a Fine Arts degree at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and collective shows in Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A. and has been presented in art fairs in Miami, New York, Basel, Zurich, Cologne, Berlin and Madrid.

Her research is based on the attempt to give shape to the intangible. Ephemeral solids are fluctuating in crystalline cases as if they were insects in an entomologist collection. By painting on several layers of translucent materials, Isabel Alonso Vega creates sculptures depicting a single frame of a transformation, giving physical stance to an abstract phenomenon. Her sculptures are not forced into a static nature. Their form and dynamicity is continuously changing according to the light and the perspective from which they are observed. Just as silent and morphing clouds, fluctuating in a space carved only by light.

Her work focuses on the intent of reversing the relationship between form and content: giving physical structure to ephemeral objects, she uses paint as if she was crafting stone.

Isabel Alonso Vega is able to stress out the continuity between tradition both iconographical and cronological- and contemporary art. She applies archetypical figures and traditional techniques to contemporary languages, studying the possibility of representing, with a universally understandable vocabulary, the evanescent present reality. (White Noise press-release)