Wounds Heal at Night

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For Luna, painting is a vital impulse. Yet her true urgency lies in translating the forms shipwrecked in her mind into images, those that burst into her psyche before bedtime. Time accumulates in her works. The first time we spoke about color was when she described the hues she was discovering while painting, when a moist red gave way to a viscous pink mixed with orange, characteristic of a scraped knee wound healing. If the dry scab was picked off or caught on the sheets during the night, the wound became a scar. A mark on the body of the passage of time.

After dedicating years to creating black and white paintings, using geometric patterns as a starting point—possibly linked to the vibration of the city—her canvases change frequency.

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Color and form unleash and then re-gather on the horizon, as she perceives the sky from the treetops. "The emotion a landscape evokes is very intense: a joy akin to pain when the depth of the blue of the horizon is at its maximum or when the clouds do those spectacular things that last so little and are much easier to remember than to describe" (1), writes Rebecca Solnit, putting into words the sensation of seeing. In the sleepless vigil that characterizes the artist's nights, the memory of a concrete window she observed with awe as a child invites her to introduce the curve into her perception of the world, in consonance with her shift towards nature. The shape of that window, which for a few months became a small daily obsession, turned out to be the minimal unit of a concentric pattern.

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Witness to the luminous sequence of dawn, a series of liminal, mysterious, and tranquil paintings result from her attempt to capture the sensation of seeing through paint. Speed as a formula linked to time appears with the introduction of mobile objects into the system. The back and forth between one dimension and another appeared in previous operations, when perforated paper became spatialized and also transformed into a tool for painting, a stencil for working on canvas. Today, three-dimensionality is also a surface for painting. Ultimately, for the artist, painting since childhood has been about coloring shapes, filling in boxes. The 3D-printed pieces painted with an airbrush lend a playful tone that possibly signals an intention of movement from introspection to interaction with others.

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The self-referential temporal spiral that characterizes María Elisa Luna's works escapes the rational determinism of the concrete tradition with which her painting was once related. This new series of works, instead, pauses at the precise instant when the external and objective transforms—reformulated, regenerated—into something internal and subjective. Like in that precise moment when, during the night, wounds heal.