Candida Alvarez
182.9 x 213.4 cm
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Alvarez’s abstractions are grounded in personal narrative and often begin with mobile photography—capturing moments from everyday life that unfold into layered compositions through a collage-like process. Color functions as a structural force in her work, mediating between shape and line, while drawing remains a foundational element. For Alvarez, abstraction becomes a space of visual wonder—an open field where formal play, memory, and observation coexist.
This series begins with Alvarez’s 93-year-old mother, who has been living in the US since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. In a long-standing practice of capturing the world around her, Alvarez takes photos of anything interesting that catches her eye in everyday moments—sitting in restaurants, at home, or in the doctor’s office. These gestures evoke devotional imagery from Alvarez’s childhood, such as Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, one of the first paintings she remembers seeing as a child andbecome compositional anchors within the paintings. Through this lens, she transforms accumulated experience into visual structure, layering intimacy, repetition, and cultural memory into abstract form.
