Paulina Cerda does not represent. She constructs visual systems where the background, far from being hidden, becomes an active part of the work. The Chilean artist's paintings are based on a layered structure that plays with the gestural and the rational—spontaneous stains, intuitive strokes, and geometric lines coexisting on the same surface in a delicate balance between chaos and control.
Based in Australia but maintaining strong ties to Chile's art scene, Cerda has refined her language over two decades, moving from expressive matter toward a more refined abstraction without losing complexity. Her work demands attention and reveals layers of meaning over time, rewarding patient viewers who are willing to look beyond the surface.
The Shape of the Echo
Cerda's most recent exhibition, "The Shape of the Echo," explores memory as a vibrating force that returns transformed. An echo is not just a returning sound, she argues, but memory itself—the form that what has already happened takes when it reaches us again. In this series, matter embodies that echo through fragments that seem to float in a suspended moment.
From the material to the intimate, from the abstract to the symbolic, her work becomes an echo that returns laden with emotions, atmospheres, and traces that reveal the beauty of imperfection. The fragment is not just a broken object but a remnant that contains history and narrative, demanding presence and attention.
If before, Cerda invited us to look at the surface of things, now she proposes that we enter their fissures, listen to their echoes, and recognize the power of each fragment. Here, beauty is not reflected only in the perfection of forms but in their incompleteness, their vulnerability, their refusal to be whole.
Flying Series
In her Flying Series, Cerda captures the instant before the image is fixed—that suspended moment where the pictorial gesture has not yet settled. She translates the movement of the brush into floating volume, giving body to energy in transit. The forms do not obey limits or rigid structures. They vibrate, expand, levitate between the abstract and the real, like impulses frozen mid-flight.
These paintings celebrate the ambiguity of the gesture: its force and its pause, its imminence and its suspension. They are a homage to form in its freest state, when it has not yet chosen a destination. Watching them, you feel the potential energy of the unmade, the power of the moment before decision.
Volume Series
The Volume Series proposes a poetics of the minimal and the suspended. Each work captures the exact instant when a drop does not fall or a flow stops, defying the logic of time and weight. Cerda converts the pictorial gesture into arrested matter, transforming the pictorial into object and the objectual into illusion.
The forms seem to emerge from the canvas with surgical precision, like autonomous densities. Here, painting becomes volume and volume becomes mystery—a meditation on the imperceptible, on what passes unnoticed but contains a profound vibration. These are not paintings of things but paintings of the moment before things become themselves.
Through the Glass
In her Through the Glass Series, Cerda transcends the traditional boundaries of the picture plane, incorporating glass and frame as active surfaces. She creates a subtle dialogue between the pictorial and the material by intervening with new layers on already finished works. The result is a play of transparencies, projected shadows, and reliefs that transform the viewer's perception.
The paint literally pierces the glass, projecting its energy beyond the support. The work becomes volume, the shadow becomes gesture, and the gaze is compelled to shift. This series confronts us with an expanded painting, where the container is also the content, and where each layer activates a different dimension of the image.
It is painting that refuses to stay flat, that insists on occupying space, that demands to be seen from multiple angles and in changing light. The glass adds another layer of complexity—literal and metaphorical—creating distance even as it reveals.
The Formal Language
Cerda's artistic value lies in her mastery of formal language—color, composition, balance—and in a profound investigation of perception. Her muted palette and layered technique create atmospheric paintings where forms float, dissolve, or emerge from backgrounds that breathe. These works have no definitive center or edge. They inhabit ambiguity, where the full and the empty, the affirmed and the insinuated, coexist.
The shadows in her paintings do not follow the logic of light but the logic of mood. The gesture interrupts or repeats, configuring internal rhythms that guide without imposing. More than representing, these paintings evoke—a sensitive vibration offered as an open spatial experience, always in transit.
The Chilean Context
Cerda emerged from Chile's vibrant contemporary art scene, where abstraction has long been a vehicle for exploring political, social, and existential questions. But her work is not overtly political. It operates on a more subtle level, investigating the structures of perception itself, the ways we construct meaning from visual information, the relationship between what we see and what we feel.
Her exhibitions have taken her from Santiago to New York, from Australia to Fort Lauderdale, building an international following drawn to her sophisticated visual language. With a signature value of 11.77 cents per square centimeter and a 20.35% accumulated revalue, the market has recognized what critics have long known: Cerda is an artist of substance, not flash.
The Coherence of Vision
What distinguishes Cerda from other abstract painters is the solid coherence between concept, process, and technical execution. These are not paintings made by accident or intuition alone. They are the result of rigorous investigation, careful consideration, and technical mastery. Every mark is intentional. Every layer serves a purpose. Every ambiguity is deliberate.
Yet the paintings never feel overworked or academic. They retain a sense of spontaneity, of discovery, of the artist responding to what emerges on the canvas. This balance between control and release, between planning and improvisation, is what gives the work its vitality.
The Invitation
Cerda's paintings do not tell you what to see. They do not impose a narrative or dictate an interpretation. Instead, they invite you to look, to linger, to let your eyes wander across the surface and discover their own path. They trust the viewer to bring their own experiences, their own associations, their own understanding.
This is art that respects intelligence. It does not explain itself or apologize for its complexity. It simply exists, confident that those who are willing to engage will find something worth finding.
In a world of instant gratification and surface-level engagement, Cerda's work is a reminder that some things require patience. That depth reveals itself slowly. That the most meaningful experiences are often the ones that resist easy consumption.
Her paintings are echoes, fragments, suspended moments—visual systems that construct themselves before your eyes if you give them time. They are invitations to enter the fissures, to listen to the vibrations, to recognize the power of incompleteness.
And if you accept that invitation, you will find yourself in a space where the background matters as much as the foreground, where shadows follow their own logic, where forms float free of gravity and meaning emerges not from what is shown but from what is suggested.
That is the space Paulina Cerda has constructed—a space of possibility, ambiguity, and profound visual intelligence. A space worth entering.