LineScape—Echoes

The work of Nathalie Alfonso (Bogotá, Colombia, 1987) explores the body, ephemerality, landscape, visibility, invisibility, and memory through line, drawing, installation, video, and performance. Her works stem from an exploration of her own physical limits and delve into her personal traces and marks. Alfonso finds performativity in drawing when she materializes repetitive gestures as an expression of her deepest obsessions.

LineScape—Echoes, 2024, is the fifth artwork in Alfonso's LineScape series, a group of works in which the artist steps away from monochrome and figurative drawing and moves towards a colored, abstract, and gestural drawing. LineScape is inspired by the artist's experiences with the subtropical wetlands of the Everglades in Florida. The series presents an array of marshes, sunsets, meadows, fields, and flowers that evoke Claude Monet's Waterlilies series and the compulsive paintings of Joan Mitchell.

LineScape—Echoes is a site-specific work composed of 14 panels of sheetrock, soft-colored pastels, graphite, and charcoal. The artwork reveals a landscape of the Everglades that seems to fade into the evening gloom like a recollection dissolving into memory. This image offers a visual meditation on impermanence, transience, and how we reconstruct memories. Alfonso confronts memory as an inexhaustible palimpsest, an exercise of continuous rewriting in which what we remember and forget makes up who we are. In this work, she posits the action of remembering as a creative act in itself, in constant tension between the factual truth and the fiction in reminiscence. In this way, the artist turns her memory into a story—a drawing—and presents it as a self-portrait: “This is a landscape that I remember, but it does not exist.”

The image of this vanishing landscape is materialized in a monumental installation that defies traditional notions of structure and representation. Alfonso alters the verticality of the wall, abstracts it, and tilts it to create a distorted and modular reflection of it, on which she builds a landscape. The execution of the piece in sheetrock responds to the artist's fidelity to maintain the ephemerality of the material, something that has characterized her work over the years. This is also a response to the challenge of presenting an installation drawing in a commercial space, where it was not possible to create it directly on the wall, considering the nature and functions of the gallery. Thus, Alfonso presents a collectible piece, but time is the one that determines its duration.

In LineScape—Echoes, all the possibilities of illumination emerge from darkness. This dance between light and shadow, between certainties and voids, reveals the complexity of how we perceive and remember the world. If Alfonso unfolds and deconstructs the line in previous works, in this installation, she blurs it and leaves only the trace of a dissipating horizon. Each gesture in this work is an event, an effort to leave a mark of muscles in movement, an obsession to capture the repetition rooted in bodily memory, and a natural impulse to occupy space and experience monumentality.

Germán Escobar.