When what's around us is green and alive
Adlín Ríos Rigau
Nature, one of the wonders of creation, has undoubtedly been a source of inspiration for countless artists throughout history. It is the genesis of landscape, an artistic genre that represents aspects of the natural environment that surrounds us. Puerto Rican artist, Jeannette Betancourt, is no exception, when this stimulus becomes the subject of her recent plastic work in the BIOME exhibition. It complies with one of the basic principles of aesthetics: unity in variety. The central theme of the exhibition is materialized through an impressive visual diversity: photography, painting, sculpture, installation and video.
Photographs juggle and fantasize wonderful transparencies. The frontier of the world presents a horizontal landscape with a very close up of a dense grove. It arises on top of another blurred and less saturated image. This overlap points to a border between the diversity of real life versus the construction of life that we humans make.
We also appreciate three videos (2021-2022) in which Betancourt seeks to slow down time to offer the viewer the opportunity to value the aesthetic subtleties offered by nature. One of them, Plethoric, shows superimpositions of shapes and chromatic transparencies that are the product of the almost impressionist capture of a fleeting moment. Among so much greenery, a flash of its complementary red steals our gaze.
Three-dimensionality is present in Last Call, The Beginning of Many Endings, Germinal/Profuse, and Ecosystems. In these works, our artist flaunts her indisputable skill with the handling of various materials, such as fabric, paper, wood, wire, graphite and paint. Ecosystems are a group of painted textiles that make up a community of plant living beings that protrude from the wall organically. Meanwhile, freestanding and in the centre of the room, Last Call is a large installation of three large-format sculptures that tells us about the critical state the planet is going through.
Growing in the middle of the garden, numbers 10, 11 and 12, are acrylic paintings on paper of impeccable workmanship, which float on a totally white negative space. These works comment on the dilemma that coexistence implies. In this case, the presence of grass, in the middle of the gardens.
If leaves are the organs of the plant specialized in capturing the energy of light through photosynthesis, Jeannette Betancourt's recreations of them are bait and a reason for aesthetic fruition that show us the way to coexist in harmony with the biosphere and with our fellow human beings.