Booming with dynamic, glowing, sweating colors, Colombian-American painter Viviana Puello's canvases range from expressionistic landscapes and cityscapes to completely abstracted compositions. Irrespective of the ostensible subjects in her works, Puello deals in temperatures, movements and sounds arranged within grid-like geometries. Her swooping, scratching, simmering palette of warm, frenetic yellows and reds and more calming, gliding blues and cool greens give her art an edgy multi-sensorial dimension that shifts and mutates as it leaps across different parts of each canvas. The whole creates a sense of operatic build up and accelerating motion, of momentum gathering with each successive brush stroke.
Explaining the intense liveliness of her imagery, Puello cites the formative nature of childhood experiences – the bright colors, sounds and smells of her coastal hometown – as a guiding aesthetic principle. Accordingly, her paintings invest everyday scenes (city streets, a chair, a river, gardens) with the magical buzz of memory, of songs half-forgotten, of smells and textures amplified through the intensity of colors and shapes.
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