Ecuador - Biennale Arte 2015

The Ministry of Culture and Patrimony of Ecuador in cooperation with the Embassy of Ecuador in Rome, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador is proud to announce artist Maria Veronica Leon as the representative for the Pavilion of Ecuador at la Biennale di Venezia, the world’s most prestigious contemporary art event. Ecuador´s official contribution to the 56th International Art Exhibition will bedeveloped by Maria Veronica Leon, a key figure in Ecuadorian Art History and one of today most dynamic artists from Latin America. Ecuador will introduce for the first time in history its own pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia, thanks to the iniciative of Maria Veronica.

For the four rooms of the Pavilion of Ecuador, Maria Veronica will create a multimedia landscape with her new video audio polyptych installations, incorporating drawings, video, photography, objects, and sound as interrelated visual techniques, that display, as she says, in a “techno-theater” where water element, as a life fountain proclaims a new state of mind. Her videos are concerned with creating new experiences through the relationship between the viewer’s shock versus unusual projections, and with the way the message is mysteriously inscribed after the experience with the unexpected, creating realities that transform the nature of the object to place it in an unfamiliar context providing it a new identity.

“Gold & Water: Metallic Constellations”

For the first time in the history of the Venice Biennale, Ecuador opens its own independent pavilion thanks to the initiative of a young multidisciplinary artist, relevant to the Art History of Ecuador, Maria Veronica Leon, currently living in Dubai (Cube Arts Gallery), who has been distinguishing herself in Paris since 1998 for her works (drawing, painting, printing, video art, video poetry, performance, digital books, and digital photography).

Gold intensity and water translucency has always been one of her favorite subjects. For the 56th
International Art Exhibition, she explores gold and water through a new proposal: “Gold Water:
Apocalyptic Black Mirrors”, a true manifesto in favor of life and art.

This committed artist deplores the excesses, exaggeration, intoxication and drifts of industry, which
penetrates to the very heart of nature (1) and alters ‘water vibration energy’ and the ‘symbolic,
historical and cultural significance of gold.’

‘Water, as governed by regulations that meet the needs of our western industrial civilisations,
encompasses the most ancient representations that, still today, bear their influence on our opinions.
Water mythology and symbolism engraved in our subconscious contribute to our perception of water’.
For the French semeiologist Jules Gritti ‘Our technical and industrial civilisation, owing to its
inherent shortages and pollutions, may exacerbate need, anguish and appetite in talking signs.’
Starting from this perspective, the Ecuadorian artist explores the mnemonic traces of our relationship
with water and gold. Her project is built around a strong symbol: the fireplace, which is cube-shaped
as a leading-edge kitchen, though with a new identity. The relevance of this realistic structure lays in
its universality, thus enabling the artist to create an original work that metaphorically evokes
humanity in the process of forgetting itself. A wall of a series of micro- waves recessed into rails
shows the images of a lost paradise recalling the walls of Plato's Cave. Several videos show the
images of a water bottling plant: shuffled rhythms on a metal background give rise to stars that open
and transform like new galaxies. Another video shows virtual and incandescent gold in an everlasting
fight against water and evokes chaos. Gold as an economic index will turn into a promise of beauty.

1. ‘Ecuador, country of solar forces, is a piece of incomparable nature. Its coasts licked by the Pacific,
its flank crossed by the Andes mountain range. The Galapagos Islands inspired ‘The Origin of
Species’ by Charles Darwin’.

Ileana Cornea, art critic and curator
Paris, January 2015