Barbara Weil.  Freedom of Form on Paper

The art pieces presented in this exhibition represent a particularly distinct selection of the artist’s body of work. Mostly from the eighties, this small-format work on paper represents, as is often the case, an extra dose of freedom of expression. But, unlike other series on paper by the same artist, these works seem to be a series with a specific social or conceptual intention and far from the discursive, or focused on a type of formal evasion. Also, unlike Drawings from Movies, full of pop iconography and symbolic contents, this work presents a completely different attitude on the part of Weil, who prefers to give prominence to drawing and form over any other element. This way she makes an exercise of building structure, texture and composition with acrylic paint and markers, often leaving the background blank as if it were graffiti on a wall. She picks up the chromatic style and structures of her sculpture as well, and transfers them to the lightness and simplicity of paper, with the added freedom of undefined contours, often the source of vaporous and ethereal textures that add movement to the compositions. In some cases she moves aesthetically from abstraction to figurative drawings, through electric colors and undulating lines that make the paper vibrate as if it were the transcription of a piece of music into a plastic and visual realm.

In these drawings, Barbara Weil seems to bring out a certain creative essence that she carries within, where the primary source of all the ideas that she develops is expressed sooner or later in different materials and formats. This work on paper, detached from all the rest of her work, holds a much deeper link, however … a sample or seed of all her style and artistic diversity; the root from which all her stylistic branches grow: geometric abstraction with architectural resonances, the expressiveness of the free line, the taste for chromatic simplicity or the interest in the work of volume and textures.
Thus, it is identified both in the whole, and in this part of her work: a tendency to celebrate art as the territory of beauty par excellence, where form is the vehicle for expression and communication but also an end in itself.