Shadows in Consciousness emerged when I moved my studio to my family’s former country house in Pomasqui, a place deeply connected to my relationship with nature and my sense of belonging.
The isolation and the intense white light filtering through the windows, casting the shadows of their iron bars across the interior, became the starting point for this series. Working with diluted oil paint and translucent layers, I created elusive forms in which light, shadows, and fragments of handwritten reflections intertwined. Concealed beneath the paint, these intimate writings recorded my emotional states, turning the paintings into spaces where memory was simultaneously veiled and revealed.
During this period, I was also confronting the absence of my father, who died in 1997. At the same time, news of the disappearance of the Restrepo brothers circulated through the radio. These personal and collective experiences converged in a profound sense of absence. Feeling disappeared myself, I sought photographs of people who had disappeared in Ecuador through Amnesty International’s archives and incorporated their portraits into my work.
Through painting, installation, and performance, works such as Shadows in Consciousness, Mental Knots, Fragmentations, and A Prayer to Memory explored grief, disappearance, and introspection. As art historian Ana Rosa Valdez has observed, these intimate experiences also resonated with the broader transformations of Ecuadorian art during the 1990s, marking an expansion of my practice towards installation, performance, and an expanded understanding of drawing.
Today, I recognize this series as a turning point in my artistic journey, when light, landscape, the body, memory, and absence began to converge into a single field of exploration.
Diana Valarezo
1996
