Magazine 32 (EN), Stories (EN)

Sheila Díaz

Snippets of Nostalgia

By Yenny Hernández Valdés

Within a continuous renovation process in works where she resorts to materials as dissimilar as acrylics, pieces of jute, forgotten letters, open envelopes, paper cuttings and fabrics, artist Sheila Díaz Garcés (Havana, 1987) gives meaning to her work. In this way she composes and embodies the piece as exquisite visual poetry, without obeying forms, but overflowing a taste of beauty and elegance, with the colors and smells of those material traces that remain, survive, persist… She gives us a work as a renewed gift full of pure frugal energy.

The artist rejects material death, and takes advantage of the last existential halo in the essence of the withered, to then propose the reconstruction in an aesthetic key. She thus opens up hope by unfolding the final point of the vestiges she finds and offers them the opportunity of a period. 

Sheila Díaz recomposes reality; she takes what the universe undoes, what others take for finished, the forgotten matter, inert at the point of sunset. In this trance, the artist gives life or a second chance to reanimate what is already inanimate. She explores and allows herself to be seduced by the materiality and sensibility of what she has at hand, what she finds in her path. They are remnants that are part of her daily life; testaments of her daily memory: existential instants that regain meaning and strength after a very personal collagist operation. 

These are works composed from the decomposed, in which she portrays her own identity as a sort of intimate landscape in which she manifests himself with total ease and dialogue. Hence the softness conveyed by the paint impasto, the textures of the brushstrokes, the brittle, almost infinite lines. The researcher of the practice of collage, Louis Aragon, stated: The principle of collage is the introduction into the painting of an object, a matter taken from the real world. And precisely, the artist assembles memory and materiality, and extracts from the fusion of both the exquisiteness of the contrast, the beauty of the corroded, the color of the old. 

Sheila Díaz appropriates materials and objects and establishes a sort of aesthetic construct in which everything contributes, in which each element finds its place in her composition. Thus, the original meaning of the archives found is placed in a second plane of relevance for the artist. During her creative process, she endows these files with a different essence, ready for the multiplicity of possible readings, according to the horizons of appreciation of those who observe.

Although the visuality of her works incites us to an analytical deconstruction through the paths of abstract language, Sheila resorts to narrative titles as textual support that allow us to conceptually round out what she arranges in a processual key. Soy, Metamorfosis interior, Mujer etérea –ella vuela- or La mosca (I Am, Inner Metamorphosis, Ethereal Woman –She Flies- or The Fly), are just some examples of those textual anchors she uses to articulate a possible narratology for any spectator.

The artist then makes us reflect on the materiality of the metaphysical and the existentiality of the material. She connects us with essential moments in which we are and in which we identify ourselves. She makes us curious about who we have been and how our becoming is shaped by those material traces that we leave in our wake and in which a good part of (her)our existence lives.

Sheila Díaz
Sheila Díaz
Sheila Díaz
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