Artistic Trajectory

In this initial phase, Arenas uses acrylics and pastels on canvas, wood or paper. The discovery of her ability with portraits is at the root of what will soon become her mastery of the human face, of the visage. This is the time when she makes her first series of Simon Bolivar, working from the wood grain to extract the images. Her landscapes, still realistic, already show her rebelliousness, her rejection of any restriction and they are an early expression of her strong attraction to water. During this period, Arenas explores diverse routes, experimenting with textures, materials and techniques until she begins to find her own language.

Little by little, as she feels she acquires mastery of her means of expression, Arenas begins to explore the powers of acrylic paints. Using them almost like watercolors, she learns to “bathe” the canvas, guiding the movement of the water to obtain multiple transparency effects. In so doing, she overcomes the bounds of realism and begins a process of dissolution of both visages and landscapes, until she concludes that in visual terms they are equivalent. “I treat the human face like a landscape”, she declares.

The ease that Arenas acquires in working with acrylics leads her to experiment with textures on the canvas surface. One after another one, diverse materials and texturen- plaster, sand, egg shell, petroleum - are integrated in her work giving body and weight to color in its transparency. That contact with pastes and materials takes her in that same period to make an incursion into sculpture, tapestry and ceramics. Her visages and landscapes reach the enormous force of freedom. It is at then that Arenas develops her characteristic “eyes”, that special way of achieving facial expression through unusually free strokes which render powerful emotions. There are no longer any limits to her dissolving the elements of each visage or landscape in space. Colors, pastes and collages seem to enter and float freely on the canvas.

Suddenly that unfolding of color stops and Arenas concentrates on experimenting with potential of petroleum as a medium. She discovers that with sepia and black and the versatility achieved by mixing petroleum with acrylic it is possible to obtain a great expressive force. Now her visages unfold dissolved in a sea of textures and tones, from the black of pure petroleum, passing through a range of grays and sepias, to the bright whites of acrylic. She is no longer satisfied with small sized canvases to develop her work and the paintings of less than a meter become rare (three of them reach 3 by 3 meters). An exception is a series of “masks” that she makes in small format, with petroleum on canvas, inspired by pre-Columbian ceramic faces.

After having explored the versatility of petroleum as pictorial matter, Arenas feels free to reincorporate color. This time she resorts to oxides and other ceramic pigments, as well as to collages. Great faces of enormous force on large format canvases characterize her work in this period. Yet, perhaps for balancing the spirit, in that same phase she develops a whole series of very small visages (30x30cm) of great subtlety and expressive sensitivity. She also leaps into the future, by an increasing mastery of the digitalized image with its infinite possibilities.

Once released from the two dimensional plane, Arenas begins to explore space, sometimes using technology as a medium; other times questioning it; sometimes using the most modern means and others rescuing the forms of living matter. Thus we find her doing collages in the computer or assembling faces with wire, knitting wool and metal netting in emptied-out TV sets; one day she works with the computer fusing photos of ferns with her “scanned” drawings, the next day she begins creating the whole Calvary scene with life-size figures, using the enormous shells of the chaguaramo tree leaves. Thus she re-encounters her first incursions in sculpture and with the early work making figures arise from the natural grain of the wood. Now she captures the fleeting figures that emerge from wrinkled paper under light and shadow and from the out of focus images of color TV. The visage continues being her goal; the freedom of search her method.