Sandra Modrego Orta

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Sandra Modrego Orta is a visual artist based in Barcelona. Her work is a hymn to life and to the beauty of human experience, always assuming its nuances. The artist creates colorful scenes, seemingly simple, that deal with topics such as love, desire, the body, and the cosmos. To speak about desire and bodies is to talk about life, not just about lust. Desire and jouissance permeate people in every aspect: they are the invisible forces that move our being, determining how we perceive the world. Modrego reflects how we look at our own and other people's bodies. Through graphic simplification, she converts human forms into lines and planes of color. Color, in her case, is inseparable from the form and content of the work, whose power derives from this process of using chromatics. Flat colors allow her to generate amplitude, letting the bodies breathe and connecting them. The artist focuses on the role of emotions, channeled through the specific use of color and its combinations. Besides the names of specific people, particular places are mentioned in the titles of the paintings. Allusions to Paris, a city where the artist has lived and to which she has a special relationship, are common. For her, French culture is imbued with personal experiences, emotions, and memories. Memory creates maps, associating experiences with certain scenarios. In her most descriptive works, Modrego creates scenes where figure and place merge in the same color space. Paris is the capital of the flâneur, the eternal stroller who loves to wander. Modrego's Parisian women indulge in what the city has to offer, enjoying the small unexpected pleasures. Their emotions of the moment are intimately bound to the geography in which they emerge. These moments of enjoyment cannot be planned: they appear when chance decides so. Chance, like cosmic energy, gives a glimpse of the transcendent nature of human existence. Even the mundane carries the mark of the universe in the artist’s imagination. Modrego's work has a special sensitivity for the symbol, which allows a deep connection between the worldly and the universal. That is why her figures are detached from their particular characteristics, creating images that are more symbolic than naturalistic. Therefore, the esoteric acquires body and life in her paintings.