From The Pixel To The Cloud
by Julia Trotta

I visited Ana Cardoso’s studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal two days before she was to pack everything up to travel to Lisbon, where she lives and works part time. The space was overflowing with geometric shaped canvases, some hung on the wall in various permutations, but most leaned on the floor, waiting for activation. I looked, we talked, Ana moved works around and intuitively played with the panels like tangrams, “making” new works through conversation and experimentation. While many fragments married effortlessly, at that point the arrangements were not yet established. As soon as a work appeared finished, Ana would turn one panel upside-down and we would consider it anew.
For From The Pixel To The Cloud, Ana embraced the complications that arise from possibility, multiplicity and divergence as opposed to adhering to a linear path of execution. Motivated by an investigation of potentials, for Ana the status of the “finished work” has been an ongoing question, in the past going so far as to apply systems and continuous choreographies to determine her installations, whether static or in flux.
Experimental and conceptual approaches to painting have been vital to the discourse around the medium in recent decades, as artists have invented new approaches, modes and objectives to expand the discipline. From Vivian Suter’s unstretched canvases hung in dense layers and stained with dirt and rain from the Guatemalan rainforest, to Mary Heilmann’s loose, eccentric abstractions that break formalist rules with humor and vulnerability, these practices confront the assumptions, values, and politics embedded in the history of the medium. Ana actively engages in this line of questioning in her practice, which both pays homage to the legacy of abstract painting, plays optical tricks with it, and literally breaks it apart.
The work presented in From The Pixel To The Cloud is looser and more generative than ever before – an accumulation of characters in the form of squares, rectangles, triangles, parallelograms and rhombuses that question their own perimeters and resist any deliberate rule or thread. But it is not just the bounds of the work at issue. The faces of the canvases are also fair game for play, both physically and optically.
Texture, pattern, color, density, opacity and legibility are explored promiscuously through the painted surface. Gestural strokes and stains dominate, almost in direct opposition to the hard edges that contain them. Yet geometric lines have a decisive function to further anatomize the bounds of each individual panel, which when flanked by other painted fragments, make it difficult to determine where one canvas ends and the other begins.
Ana’s conclusive gesture will take place on September 20^th when she will install the panels made between New York and Portugal on the walls of Nuno Centeno gallery in Porto, consecrating a new series of paintings. The public is invited to visit the gallery during the installation process, which will take place between 10am and 6pm. A vernissage will be held for the artist at 10pm on Saturday September 21^st.