Ana Montiel is a visual artist and designer currently based in Mexico. Her artistic practice is not medium defined but rests upon two main themes: perception and impermanence.
The artist is interested in the conceptual issues of perception and phenomenology, based on the premise that reality is nothing but a collective and controlled hallucination. Intrigued by neuroscience and quantum physics, she considers herself a "mapper of the unconscious", producing the Fields series - a multicoloured adventure meant as a tribute to the intangible.
In the course of practicing hybrid art, drifting from drawing to design to artistic direction, Ana Montiel shunned painting during her school years before finally embracing it. Originally from Spain (b. 1981), the artist worked in Barcelona and then in London, before settling down in Mexico. Her colour palette stimulates both visually and acoustically, like a kind of chorus, giving each spectator their own unique symphony.
She gathers the colours and applies them carefully with her spray gun. The tints fuse, superimpose, then come to rest. Detail by detail, each grain of colour is adjusted according to a meticulous method of application of acrylics, with some paintings having up to forty sub-layers. The effect is magnetic, in much the same vein as the mystical installations of American artist James Turrell or the meditative velvets of the Italian Ettore Spaletti. With her pictorial works, Ana Montiel opens windows onto a world that topples us and shoves us towards new prophetic dimensions, dimensions of the infinite and unknown. — Clélia Dehon
