Catalina Chervin starts her drawings by covering a large sheet of paper with short lines and small curves that become the support of what she will draw next. These first strokes arte the framework on which shi will weave successive layers of sort strokes until she achieves a certain atmosphere as ell as the balance between what shi is looking for and what shi finds.
She allows her hand to move freely throughout the page, led by an internal impulse she does not try to control. It is when she realizes that she can let herself go, that she feels that her work is in progress. It is this unpremeditated attitude that brings about the difference between one drawing and another. She is always surprised by the result.
Chervin feels that the her work is a way of dealing with the frustrations she suffered in her childhood. Born and bred in Corrientes, the luscious province, her green jail, she was torn between her love of nature and her passion for drawing, an unacceptable trait in a well–behaved child, according to the elders. Surrounded by a loving environment, and yet lonely, she withdrew into herself. Every one of her drawings is a story she tells herself trying to understand what happened and why it happened.
She attended art school while studying medicine, trying to follow in her father’s footsteps, a dedicated eye doctor. After three years she gave up medicine without regrets, to pursue her career as an artist.
Her first portraits are labyrinths she designed looking for a way out into a more congenial world. They are indicative of her inner tensions, visceral portraits –in the spirit of Francis Bacon- prompted by physical perception of the world. Intensive and introspective, her drawings create sensitive spaces, to describe vital biological preoccupations intensified by spiritual longings.
In her last pieces the drawing is far more open. The lines stretch vertically and horizontally. And trough she has worked in nuclei and paths of her old intricate visceral pattern in a smaller scale, the context is different. The atmosphere and the artist’s preoccupations have changed. Her strokes have woven a fabric throughout the canvas that is not limited by a contour, it could go on forever. We face an erotica landscape that describes the geography of the body as well as the geography of the land. |
