Isabella Cuglievan: A ripple and a nest

Most captivating paintings elicit encounters through either centripetal or centrifugal force. The former wind inward, drawing the viewer toward a finite center, while the latter expand outward like an ever-widening gyre, enveloping the viewer from all sides. Isabella Cuglievan’s prismatic acrylic and watercolor paintings mediate both. Radiating geometric shapes unfurl as undulating bands of color infold, and the medial unpainted rounds both recede and distend. In this way, the compositions recall cinematic sunsets where the florid colors continue to develop across the arc of the sky even as the light draws your gaze to the horizon line. 

This animating energy spans the seven paintings and four works on paper comprising A ripple and a nest. Here, abstract and botanical forms appear in perpetual motion, suggesting a flower blooming, water rippling around a sinking stone, a single star blazing against the night, or the spiraling of a seed pod falling from such great heights. At other times, the interplay between color and shape gives way to pure visual rhythm that’s both sensual and spiritual, material and energetic. The dynamic tension between expansion and contraction imbues the canvases with their kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinogenic magnetism.  

Cuglievan, who was born and raised in Lima, unites traditional textile palettes and patterns from her surroundings with forms inspired by the local flora and fauna. Ribbons of gem-tinted tones, graphic concentric circles, and luminous flat multi-layer tracts imagine woven designs and embroidered motifs. The bold interlocking cobalt bands in Birth of a flower, 2024 resemble borders and trim, while the delicate, sinuous brush marks in The imprint of the sun, 2024 and Bract, 2024 invoke threads strung taut across a loom. The repetition of relatively even squares in the autumnal A map of lichen, 2024 mirror quilted patchwork as the parallel swipes of tangerine, chartreuse, and vermillion in Borrowed sun II, 2024 undulate like bolts of fabric in the wind. 

Throughout, the lush, voluptuous brush marks feel generative, fertile, vividly alive, as if expressing the same energetic force that surges through all green things that grow toward the light. This vitality is, in turn, echoed and evolved with each restless brushstroke that proceeds sequentially from the one before. Cuglievan draws forward individual strands of color, binding them to new shades in the proceeding gesture. Like sedimentary rock, the pigments accumulate and erode, combining and recombining the same material in infinitely novel variations. Through this process of reaching and returning, the intricate interrelating elements form a tonally harmonious whole: the enduring image transcends the sum of its parts.    

While it’s easy to associate the radial symmetry of a flower’s corolla with the originating form at the heart of the paintings, the artist perceives their visual and metaphoric meaning as more fluid. In their multiplicity, they’re simultaneously the sun with its emanating beams, the lucent labyrinth of a butterfly’s wing, the crystalline interior of a calcite geode, the delirious, rhizomatic spread of moss across a rock, or perhaps, even a void—a nothingness through which all of life begins and ultimately returns. —Tara Anne Dalbow