María Carolina Fontana
Fundación Iturria
ArtNexus, #121 (June 2024)

The solo show by the young Uruguayan artist María Carolina Fontana, titled .net and comprising ten medium-sized oil paintings (80 x 100 and 100 x 150 cm), was recently hosted by the Fundación Iturria. Fontana’s work is based on the techniques and investigations of art history and contemporary culture, as well as philosophy, especially posthumanism. A special motherboard emerged in her mind while she was an artist in residence at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai (China) between 2019 and 2020. Away from her family and friends during the pandemic, and during a video call, she became conscious—as in an epiphany—of a certain perspective, different focal points, and the loss of references: the cut was imposed.

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Clinging to this awareness, once in Uruguay she began to paint the different cities she had visited, based on the photographs she had taken from high towers or panoramic buildings in Shanghai, Montevideo, Paris, and Punta del Este, and placed them in dialogue with representations derived from the circuitry of computer motherboards. The photographs taken at high altitudes allowed her to synthesize urban structures in shapes and volumes so that the farther they move from the center, the more they branch out and open onto unknown paths. Thus, the cuts become planes of color that give rise to uncertainty, subjectivity, and flights of imagination. We could wish or predict, as a next step, for these planes to extend infinitely and erase all limits until we are completely enveloped to the point of losing the notion of the boundary between representation and reality.​

 

In turn, these cities seem to become less and less distinguishable, merging as one. A product of globalization and homogenization of contemporary life? Or the result of the cropped vision that the artist has chosen? In some cases, certain elements allow us to identify cities based on iconic buildings. Greens predominate in Shanghai (2022), the first piece of the series, the inaugural one. All these paintings have been created with a specific chromatic intention and cropping that sought the prevalence of greens, blues, and grays: colors precisely related to computer motherboards. The canvas in which these links and parallels become most evident is in double.net (2023), where a false axial symmetry is generated between a motherboard and Montevideo.

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Although static, these canvases convey a vertiginous movement that seems to possess traces of speed in contrast to the time and care it took to make each one of the pieces. But they also point to the speed engulfing us, which emanates from these circuits and the frenetic flow of data and information we live immersed in.

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Fontana’s work has the ability to reach us from different distances. At first, the color planes are totally dominant. Then, from mid-distance, we can better capture the city and its elements (buildings, parks, streets, bridges) and distinguish the cities’ motherboards, which at first glance can be confusing. Likewise, we start perceiving how the buildings and streets gently disintegrate into fully expanding colors that are projected on the surface of the canvas in an imaginary and artificial way, with total disregard for traditional perspective. But as we lean forward to observe the center of the painting as close as possible, we find incredible thoroughness and detail in each of its components. It should be noted that the artist paints only by hand. She does not recur to any other strategy, such as offset or masking, to produce her fine lines: a challenging game she plays with herself.

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Like with any solo show, we may intuit the journey the artist has taken and will take. Fontana’s interests, obsessions, and motivations revolve around the contradictions between the digital age, technology, and painting: fields that, while belonging to different origins and times, coexist in the expansive spaces that she builds. The line and the expanding urban organization appear as the structuring components of the chaos and disorder all around us. The artist seems to be looking for a way to rationalize and give order to this reality. Since I know her personally, I can say that her thoroughness and discipline are essential aspects of her work and personality.

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Lastly, the exhibition’s name, .net, refers to the network that keeps us hyperconnected, traversing us or “connecting and trapping us,” in the artist’s words. This way, we are caught up in an anomalous, expansive reality that is projected onto an unexplored realm where the relationships between human beings, nature, cities, and technology are put to the test.