The Garden of Forking Paths

Galerie1214 presents Berlin-based Brazilian painter Isabelle Borges in a solo exhibition. With her decisive position for an abstraction, that feeds on experiences in the practical world, she has been following a consistent project of artistic research for many years.



The experience of growing up in the drawingboard-city Brasilia, was for Borges the starting point of her explorations of spaces. The resulting sensitization by a rationalistic-modernist city planning and architecture allowed her to develop important motives of her work. Her interests expanded into the exploration of general patterns of spatial organization throughout nature. In her work, Borges seeks to find the nexus between the poetic, the intuitive, and the analytic, revealing to the patient observer the metaphysical dimensions of reality. Painting means for her delving deeper into what cannot be described neither by sociology (the big narrations) nor by mathematics alone.



Correspondingly, Borges' objects, wall paintings and paintings continue to develop surprising qualities: when two color surfaces differ in delicate nuances and unity becomes diversity; when an object causes its surroundings to glow with luminous reflected color; when apparently dividing lines become vibrating edges of interpenetrating spaces.



The painter's title for the exhibition is borrowed from the story of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"and refers to the romantic motif of an infinite connection between all things (and beings). Since such deep interrelationships are not representable as such, it needs an aesthetic system in which a language for this can be formulated. Mathematics and geometry as important instruments for Borges are therefore means to an end for her, in order to open up the physical as well as the metaphysical world through their own visual vocabulary.
 

Photos: Eric Tschernow 2018