Página 12, "Paisajes desde el cielo", Diciembre 1996

Landscapes from the sky (By F.L.)
Isabel de Laborde
Isabel de Laborde (Mèxico, 1953) is living in Argentina since 1980, and an important part of her production, during the most recent years, is centered along the visual research of Patagonia.  Her paintings and engravings perform as means of knowledge and the appropriation of space. Thus, she kept presenting a series of abstract landscapes, in which the desolate acquires a metaphysical hue.  The artist’s gaze came from a distance, and her point of view, was generally aerial.
In her new exhibition, the distance from the landscape is even greater. It is about a far away  distance, but no longer from a metaphysical perspective. Now, those archaic landscape maps, inscriptions, cartographic projections, have a development that is subordinated to the montage. Landscapes are turned into objects. The enormous wall installations are a consequence of that montage, and the apprehended and objectified landscape – by the direct gaze and the adornments of memory- is specially designed for the assigned places: The two great walls facing each other, on the ground floor of the Banco Patricios Foundation. Such adaptation – considering the size, the distance at which the viewers stand, the height, and the space disposition, lend the art pieces, a stage effect producing a double impact, as when seen at a distance, or when trying to decipher details.
The lack of symmetry and regularity in the hanging of the papers, interplay with the continuity and de-continuity of the drawing, inducing the eye to move along a certain path, whether looking at the whole surface, or stopping at each paper.  At the same time, the combination of certain lines as gestures and minimal details, inverted and mirrored drawings, suggested shapes and broad brush strokes crossing through several overlapping papers, propose different times of execution, successive and simultaneous, intense or reflective, suggested or detailed. Such complexity of forms and variety of speeds in order to make the perception more dynamic, establish different inner tempos and exploit the possibilities of the ground floor, with the great advantage of its ubiquity, and the disadvantage of it being a space of passage: everything is taken into account at the construction levels of both installations.
The sets of drawings though, are essentially simple. Their dialogue with the viewer, as Isabel de Laborde likes to say, is carried out in silence, between the inspiring and poetic production of the artist, and the creative look of the viewer. 
(At the corner of Callao St, and Sarmiento St., ground floor, until December 31st.)
Drawing by Isabel de Laborde
Detail of “Cosmic Inscription”, 1996.