Events

"Mine", Underline Gallery, NY

Meet Lia Porto, por Casey Burry

Lia Porto is an Argentina-based artist who works in 2-D mixed media painting & collage. Her work is influenced by travel & is characterized by a deceptively sophisticated brightness of color & light. Works mainly on paper or on canvas have a complexity of mark-making, diverse technical application of paint, and uniqueness of composition which takes the artwork beyond the realm of decorative abstraction and into the imaginary world of the artist’s mind.

Underline: Tell us what motivates you artistically.

Lia: I wonder many times why do I paint and what do I paint? Same way I wonder who am I? What am I doing here? I never arrive to a conclusion, maybe there isn’t a real, univocal one. What I do know is that painting is an exercise that helps me adapt to every day life. I search for the invisible world through matter. In a way, painting is a practice that helps me cross from the internal world to the external world, and vice versa. It isn’t a mental process. It’s a connection with the unlimited, subtle field that is way beyond me. This is why my paintings refer to daily experiences (food, coffee, yoga postures, birds, buildings, animals) as well as unreal landscapes related with emotions or imagination.

U: “Painting is a practice that helps me cross from the internal world to the external world, and vice versa.”What are some of your influences?

L: My work is essentially organic; it follows the rhythm of nature. Like a cut out or an open window to a greater, bigger and mysterious landscape, it suggests spaces that emerge gradually like those of a woven pattern or old embroidery. Within this wild, soft landscape, the ornamental aspects of those patterns start to grow, generating more intricate ones that take us to the artificial experience. This ambiguity –natural and artificial at the same time- conform a passage, a threshold that invite us to hover, stay and then drift into several routes within the painting. … Read More