_Yaima Carrazana_Liveability_01_13_23/03_13_23_Dossier

The exhibition “Liveability”, by Cuban artist resident in Amsterdam Yaima Carrazana, is in line with her most recent projects, expressing many of her concerns through painting and, more specifically, through colour. In this way, she once again addresses colour coding and the meticulous design used by the Dutch government in its corporate branding, with the same tones appearing in her work as a mechanism of liberation.

This exhibition features sets of harmonious colours that arise from atlases of liveable environments, which provide updated, online information on the quality of Dutch life, including data and tables in colour. This culminates with a series of monochrome paintings featuring a strident tone of yellow, which Carrazana has used in her most recent work, as taken from an identifying colour principle of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

These yellow monochromes are not simply colour planes. If we examine them in detail, we see what could be studies of the Kazimir Malevich painting “Yellow Plane in Dissolution”, where the yellow tone might be conceived as a colour plane moving through space. Here the shorter edge on the right side of the plane vanishes, seeming to disappear into the background as well. This piece is now part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
All this artist’s work appropriates the radicality of colours, carrying it into the realm of oil painting, perhaps as a way of exploring the human scale behind classification and marginalisation.

With the support