María Eugenia Akel creates a many-layered world that combines photography, drawing, digital technology and painting. Starting with photographs that include pictures of buildings and people taken in her native Chile, she manipulates those shots in Photoshop, and prints the images onto canvas. She then embellishes those canvases by drawing and painting over the photographic images. This results in works with a dreamlike feel, as objects blur into each other in suggestive combinations. Their collage-like effects make excellent use of the artist’s compositional skills, putting the viewer’s eye in constant motion as it follows the connective threads Akel establishes between various elements.
While she works primarily in black and white, the artist also has a well-developed sense of when to put dashes of colors in her works, using a wash of pastel blue or a block of bright red to give a canvas an extra point of focus. Her exceptional ability to draw the viewer into these engaging environments puts her work into a category all its own.