Art Paris

The works of Leyla Cardenas, a mid-career Colombian artist who lives and works in Bogota,  represent and unearth, literally and figuratively, cycles of a stratified landscape. Neglected ruins of former structures and quarries at the fringes of urban development provide Cardenas with material testimony to the cyclically destructive effects of industrialization; they reappear in her works as spectral images on stretched, frayed fabrics or meticulously stratified cross sections of past restoration efforts. Her recent research materializes a new direction of her practice with rural and urban ruins or natural environments, pointing out signs of life. Such as  this dilapidated room with a flowery wallpaper to bring nature inside, discovered by the artist in the museum Guimet where she exhibited for the last Biennale of Lyon (Unfolded room for Guimet). Or those lichens growing on a wall made of concrete next to the polluted river of Bogota (Entrelacer). Or this luxuriant nature embracing old tren stations now abandoned in Colombia (Dephasage). They all testify to the resilience of plant life and the hope of overcoming the climate emergency. These works, both textile and photographic, which sometimes intertwine or dissociate, concretize the aesthetic and political reflection led by the artist and initiated in her previous works. Here, her perception of the future becomes clearer and brings into play a combative nature, protagonist, resilient, taking back its rights.