PhD Candidate Macarena Rioseco
Specialist areas
- Geometric Abstraction
- Complexity
- Painting & Performativity
- Deleuze and Guattari
- Fractals
- Non-representation
- Enaction
Website
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/pg/riosecoc/portfolio.pdf
Biography
Picture by Felipe Baeza Fuentes - Photorealistic 3D sculpture - Digital - 2014
Macarena Rioseco is from Chile. She is carrying out a practice-based PhD research in Abstract Painting at Lancaster University UK. She holds an MA degree in Fine Arts (UK), postgraduate studies in painting Restoration (Chile and Argentina), a BA degree in Visual Arts and in Digital Illustration (Chile). She has exhibited her work in Chile, Argentina, UK and now for the first time in Italy. She has attended to a number of international conferences to present her works.
Through her research she aims to redefine Abstraction in painting. She proposes that Abstraction is in contraposition with representation. The former instantiates as an en-active phenomenon in which a painter dynamically engages with pictorial materials through a performative process. She defines this process as ‘Abstracting’, a method that departs from representation to engage with painting as an overt action.
Her theoretical research mainly draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and Science of Complexity to revisit Geometric Abstraction, to produce and analyse paintings. She constructs pixelated abstract images based on ideas such as fractals, collective formations and emergent properties that then paints using traditional techniques and following a repetitive systematic procedure.
Her practice proposes a form of Gestural Minimalism as performative pictorial mode. Based on this strategy, the primary structure of her paintings is a grid dividing the pictorial plane. One single brushstroke is placed inside each square space, a unit of a single tone and a generous amount of paste. The textures on the paint from each square give evidence of the tool used and the movement performed for their realisation. As accumulations of coloured strokes compose the images, colour and matter turn to be the principal elements in her paintings. The perception of her work is aimed to appear as a complex and dynamic system. Depending on factors such as the time of observation, the positioning of the viewer or the lightning conditions, the observer can always encounter new perceptions and relations between colours, shapes and materials.