Alexandra Kennedy Troya (on Gabriela Rojas' exhibit - Bienal Cuenca/Ecuador 2006)

Many years ago, I remember a very pleasant afternoon I spent with the Spanish painter Zobel, at the time director and creator of the Abstract Art Museum in the hanging houses of Cuenca(Spain). I also remember his paintings—beautiful abstract paintings in gray, yellow, black, white-tones, and our intimate wishes to get to our most intimate pulses. He was a lovely man. The 1980's were just beginning. Over twenty years later, on my first visit to the young artist Gabriela Rojas' exhibit, (Casa del Coco gallery, International Bienal of Cuenca) I once again, feel those memories of such fall afternoon years back. Zobel, a painter, Rojas, a photographer. Both with the same evocative, deep, intimate wishes to explore and transmit a warm intimacy, which is translated in new images that transform themselves into series of art pieces that relate one the next.

Gabriela is a photographer, and the abstract exploration of photographic images is still relatively young. I am impressed by her subtleness on the treatment of organic waving spaces in images that flow without a beginning nor end. Her photographs (ultrachrome prints) are atmospheric, light landscapes, barely touched, barely visible footprints. Images such as "Intuition" or "Mystic" force the observer to introduce themselves, or rather, to nostalgically wonder between soft folds of delicate multiple colors. They force you to create certainties that immediately seem uncertainties, cavities that one second later change their form to their opposite. Sometimes, as in "Trazado", you believe to have a veil in front of you, a curtain on the front plane that delineated a limit, you look at it, you look between vertical lines and your eyes are lost behind, in the distance, they take you to an uncertain cosmos that flows concentrically like "Canal". Some other times you would want to get lost in the orifices of an erotic carnage, suggestive, delicate, fluent like "Fugaz" or "Essence". Then, strangely, I begin to feel a feminine language of forms and sensations. That subtleness, with which many times moves us around the world, and does not let us delineate the borders of life.

Gabriela Rojas is one of those younsters that began her studies in a technical major (Chemical Engineering) at Cuenca State University. She then changed her major to the arts and design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (Georgia, USA), and her first steps are filled of success. She has been part of many group exhibits in the US. She is also an art teacher in this country. And she is one of the first artists that the new Cuenca Bienale wishes to sponsor and discover with the purpose of capturing future generations of artists that today live far from Cuenca or the country but are part of this great group formed by the hundreds of people that left their homeland but kept it in their memories. Their work, if it is art, is armed in a combination of lived cultures, assumed cultures, and revived cultures. Congratulations for this first steps in promoting these new figures.