Catalina León
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981
Catalina León is a visual artist and cultural manager. She creates installations, paintings, and embroideries in various materials: cotton fabrics, plasterboard, wood, canvas, tree leaves, earth, and plants. Her nanny, who was studying Fine Arts by mail, introduced her to painting and took her to her first painting course.
Her formal art education began in 1998 with different workshops, and then she received the scholarship CC Rojas-UBA-Kuitca. The origins of her work lies in the way we relate to death and her eagerness to create rituals of transition between the physical and spiritual world.
León composes altars and paintings on large canvases, accompanied by materials from nature. Her works show the process these pieces go through. She never sees a finished material; it is constantly changing, modifying itself. In her work, Pintura para piso y plantas, awarded the arteBA-Petrobras award in 2007, she creates a metaphor between art and the power of life. The space is invaded by nature, and the painting emerges under layers that sediment diverse stories, accumulated over time.
This vision of work in process, having an uncertain outcome, arose from an unexpected event that occurred during her first exhibition: A piece of the installation that she had mounted in a gallery was stolen, so she decided to close the exhibition and sell those pieces in the vegetable store in the corner of her workshop, each one at 15 pesos per gram. "For me, that event was founding and enabling. I realized that my work could adapt to whatever came along. I also lost my fear of being excluded from the art world."
That first exhibition, which was called Convertidas en perlas tus lágrimas brotan del mar, was not only the moment she discovered the versatility of art, but it was also the seed that would later germinate in all her projects. "That piece contains all my other pieces. It is as if I could always go back to that piece and make a new one from there."
León decontextualizes artwork, takes it off the pedestal that holds the canvas. Between paintings, sculptures, poetry, and craftwork, she weaves a discourse closely related to the communitarian. Since 2010, she has been a part of Vergel, an NGO that puts art at the service of people's health and wellbeing. Through the implementation of artistic programs, training, and dissemination actions, they try to generate constructive dialogues between art, health, and education. But her interest in social issues came to a turning point during a trip she made to Guatemala in 2009, where the combination of exuberance, beauty, and the tragic history of the country made her decide to fully devote herself to social issues.
Something about working with people is similar to her work; the story that runs through them speaks for itself. In this way, she arranges the materials she chooses in her workshop, sometimes for years, and lets them get dirty and take shape. The production process is long and is only interrupted when she has to exhibit, otherwise the works are there, ready to transmute and take on other forms and meanings. Sometimes, she says, with closed eyes there is something in the material that moves her, something that does not connect with what is visible. "Painting is one of those things that I can't quite put into words; there are are sensations that I can only transmit through painting."
