Gokche Erkan, Summer 2004 — Toronto, Canada
Carolina Villamil was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She graduated with honors from the Fine Arts program at Universidad de los Andes in 1991. In 1996, she moved to Paris to further her training in artistic expression through digital media at the Miguel Chevallier Atelier.
Upon returning to Bogotá, she received several distinctions, including the BBVA National Painting Prize, organized by one of Colombia’s largest banks, as well as the prestigious Porvenir National Painting Prize.
Carolina works primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas. An essential part of her creative process involves working with images on the computer, which she uses to develop her sketches and as a starting point for her paintings. Through these digital explorations, she creates a new relationship between humankind and nature, in which color transforms each source of reality while keeping the pleasure of aesthetic experience alive.
Her works are held in major corporate and private collections in Colombia, Canada, the United States, France, Germany, and Brazil, as well as in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá.
Since 1999, she has held six solo exhibitions and participated in fourteen group exhibitions.
This exhibition marks Carolina’s first presentation in Toronto, Canada.
Text by Gokche Erkan, Art Curator — Summer 2004 — Toronto, Canada
María Teresa Guerrero, April 1999 — Bogotá, Colombia
Ever since landscape assumed a leading role in the nineteenth century, artists have never ceased to envision it, reinvent it, and transform the delights that nature offers to the sensitive eye of the observer. To contemplate the glory, splendor, and diversity of the infinite panoramas, hidden corners, and fleeting moments that surround us — and that possess a life distinct from our own — constitutes one of the richest sources of study and visual pleasure.
Today, beyond a purely contemplative interest, the emergence of new working tools such as the computer has allowed artists to incorporate them into their practice and expand the possibilities of their visual outcomes. Such is the case of Carolina Villamil, an artist whose work moves between nature, its richness, and the development of technology. It is the power to replace one idea of nature, space, and the perception of light and color with an object — or an object with an idea.
In her work, landscape becomes the perfect connection between the intimacy of detail and the ability to carry it, with all the freedom of her own visual language, into rhythms and movements, expressed through the most beautiful bursts and intensifications of color.
Her inspiration, always linked to her memories and to the chromatic feasts preserved in her memory, thus constructs, orders, and recreates a new nature — immaculate and crystalline — in which aesthetic pleasure remains ever present.
María Teresa Guerrero, Art Curator — April 1999 — Bogotá, Colombia