In this text, researcher Adolfo Wilson analyzes Venezuelan painter Emilia Azcárate’s work on the basis of the notions of “trace” and “sign.” According to Wilson, Azcárate’s art can be understood as a “linguistic and communicative model” insofar as it layers materials and expressive resources. Throughout the text, Wilson points out the relationships Azcárate’s work establishes between figure and background, macrocosm and microcosm, support and text. He analyzes the specificity of Azcárate’s work due to the organic materials she uses, her vision of nature, and the formal value of the images she creates. Wilson discusses as well the passage from two to three dimensions in her work.

In the year 2000, an exhibition of recent paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations by Venezuelan artist Emilia Azcárate (b. 1964) was held at the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas. The exhibition evidenced Azcárate’s expressive synthesis in multifaceted explorations of materiality and of organic elements, and the techniques associated with them. From the perspective of linguistic, this text by the exhibition’s curator, Adolfo Wilson, sheds light on the meaning of the artist’s proposal while also penetrating the poetic potential of writing. In his view, Azcárate leaves her “trace” or “mark” on the work, turning it into a “register” of the creative process that attests not only to the body action on materiality but also to the quality substance manipulability of its components. This approach to nature partakes of a vision of the landscape that was emerging in Venezuelan young art in the nineties, one that, in Azcárate’s work, undermined strategies based on intervention in the environment to instead insert the environment into the museum space. Finally, Wilson establishes that the process-based nature of Azcárate’s work allows for an analysis of the relationships between time, space, and interval while giving shape to a particular form of writing.