Marianela Pérez | Balance

Balance. Marianela Pérez

For years, Marianela Pérez’s pictorial work was shaped by geometric compositions in vibrant colors that created dense surfaces, where tense triangles seemed to be thrust outward by an internal explosion. This abstract eruption mirrored the emotional impact of the artist’s migratory experience, revealing a sense of inner fragmentation and simultaneous reconstruction. Color played a leading role, asserting itself with intensity to convey the disorientation of the new, the foreign, and the unresolved.

A multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and digital media, Pérez explores in the works gathered for this exhibition a stratified process that begins with photographs taken during her early days in Miami, when the striking sunsets of South Florida—saturated with intense oranges, reds, and fuchsias—became a form of emotional anchoring amidst the uprooting. These images were then digitally altered in a gesture that allowed her to translate the vibration of color into visual structure. From those digital sketches, Pérez moves to the canvas, bringing the initial emotion into the abstract realm of geometry.

In Balance, Pérez’s geometric language finds a more contained expression. Colors have softened into pastels, forms that were once compact have begun to drift apart, and the canvas—once entirely covered—now reveals unpainted areas, alluding to a breath that grounds us in the present as a necessary pause. The works in this exhibition reflect the emotional sedimentation of the artist after years of contemplating different skies, adapting to new rhythms, and reshaping her identity in dialogue with the unfamiliar. They reveal not only the quiet settling of affections, but also a way of looking back at the intensity of the migratory journey and reconciling with a landscape that has slowly, and gently, become “home”.

Katherine Chacón