Solo exhibition Astrid Sommer artist, from 27th of May until 12th of August

Curator Conchi Alvarez

Pareidolia is a word of Greek origin that refers to the appreciation of forms as recognizable objects, a common perceptual illusion. The viewer is essential for this… it always is, but in many of the trends and tendencies there is a clear cut between the action of the artist, the actor of the work, and the final act, once it is completed. Many artists are not interested in what their work may provoke in the viewer. This is not the case. For Astrid, to know what impressions, ideas or feelings her paintings have provoked, becomes essential.

Pareidolia is an exhibition of fourteen works of art, all done in acrylic on canvas, several of them in large format. The titles are a bunch of abstract concepts: “Impulse”, “Disparity”, “Distinction”, “Link”, “Context”… Surely the work of Astrid belongs to abstraction, to the most elegant, optimistic and colorful. In it the “vibration of the soul” is perceived, without which,  Kandinsky said, the work cannot be produced. And there it is, in each painting, a reflection of the most intimate Astrid, confirming another statement from the great master of abstraction, “the spirit of each artist is reflected in the form. The form bears the stamp of the personality”. Astrid herself states that colors have an emotional meaning and it is easily noticeable. We are looking at a great example of subjective abstraction… and poetic. Because, as another artistic poet states, Ai Wei Wei, “(…) the poetry serves to keep our intellect in the previous state to rationality. It takes us to a pure sense of contact with our feelings”. And this is precisely what we have with Astrid´s paintings, pure feeling. But not the expression of feelings “as experienced in real life, but those feelings imaginatively lived, in that level where reality and unreality merge”. The feeling of the artist is, no doubt, in a work she claims to gestate in a fun and spontaneous way, hoping it will be the personal experience of each one, their personal baggage, which guides the reading of her acrylics. She yearns for each piece to communicate with the viewer, to “say” something without being mediated, appeal to the ability of each eye to interpret and find out what happens in each canvas and, better yet, what it provokes in each one. There is no conceptual basis to guide the work, because she is not a fan of explanatory texts but, although the titles are of a calculated vagueness, she cannot help but bring with them significant clues that, like it or not, will affect that particular and nontransferable immersion. Pareidolia is a word of Greek origin that refers to the appreciation of forms as recognizable objects, a common perceptual illusion. The viewer is essential for this… it always is, but in many of the trends and tendencies there is a clear cut between the action of the artist, the actor of the work, and the final act, once it is completed. Many artists are not interested in what their work may provoke in the viewer. This is not the case. For Astrid, to know what impressions, ideas or feelings her paintings have provoked, becomes essential.