​Karina Chechik

Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

”That line, from Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem provides an interpretative key to Karina Chechik’s Architecture of Light. Beyond the artistic merit of the work, there lies a political-theological statement of great importance for our time. Chechik is challenging us to focus on the imperfection in every structure, the crack in every theology. It is in those cracks and imperfections that, for her, humanity approaches the divine."

"Churches, mosques and synagogues are living monuments to humanity’s search for truth. They are testaments to our relentlessly inquisitive nature. They, in brick and stone and glass, represent the answers we have found so far. The question that Chechik forces upon is, however, is whether we will stick to answers past, whether we will stay safely within the walls of our particular cathedral, or whether we will dare follow the light the cracks let in. “

Antonio Fernandez Ferrer  Professor at Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Writer specialized in Jorges Luis Borges

"That is what Karina Chechik achieves with her trees and staircases: she makes them fly-swim and emerge or submerge us."

"Trees inside, we hear and see the roots-veins and the arteries-branches, precisely because K.’s trees, like those of that other K. from Prague, are also firmly rooted to the ground, but at the same time they fly and make us fly in their purest appearance." (From "The trees of K". UBS Solo show, Switzerland, 2008)

Perderse (y encontrarse) soñando un claro laberinto. 

No son citas al uso, por lo tanto, las de los cuadros de Chechik, sino, por el contrario, referencias y sobre todo inscripciones que transmutan los contextos originales de las palabras, dejando que el lector-contemplador abra el sentido hacia rumbos imprevistos."

.Perderse y encontrarse es, por lo demás, efecto primordial de los laberintos...

 Tal es el reto: sólo perdiéndonos en el laberinto –y en este caso, en un laberinto en tercera o cuarta dimensión múltiplemente soñada por Borges, Ricci, Chechik y quien   escribe o lee estas líneas–, logramos encontrarnos. (From "El Laberinto Vertical". MARQ Solo show, Argentina, 2018)

Corey Brennan  Professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey (USA), and former Professor at the American Academy in Rome

The light of hope for immigrants: the Faro degli Italiani d’Argentina, in Rome and Buenos Aires. Karina Chechik will create a dual, simultaneous installation in Rome and Buenos Aires, focused on the symbolic Lighthouse that Italian immigrants to Argentina erected on the Gianicolo hill in Rome in 1911, as a gift to Italy. In its early years the Argentinian Lighthouse on the Gianicolo Hill, gifted to Italy by Italian emigrants to Argentina, brilliantly illuminated Rome from its height, with lights that evoked the red, white and green tricolor flag of Italy. But for many decades it has remained closed, and stopped showing its colors. What better time to revive it than now, in artistic intervention that will serve as a timely reminder of historical context in what many perceive as a present-day refugee crisis?

Monica Nucera Mantelli  Director, Museo del Design GH di Torino, Italy

Architectures of Light. So the real protagonist of the architecture is the Light. That light that shakes the vigorous wings of the vaults, great towers, arches and rose windows which break into the dark of the buildings, signing the perfect adhesion between significatum and significant, between the power of matter and the wisdom of the spirit. Between the human strength embodied in the stone and the mystic vertigo that the esprit envelops around and into buildings that own great spiritual appealKarina Checkik’s art, made by pictures and photographs, can be framed as a system of readings of signs in a continuing evolution, as a living language, organic, structured in imaginative forms which open the formal representation in Doors, Bridges and Meeting places where it is almost impossible to find them.

Mariano Michaud  PhD philosophy and theology from the Catholic University of Argentina

Light and warmth. “The splendor of being and its warmth gathered in a same glance and in a same piece of art, the one of the artist Karina Chechik. A gaze that, above all, ch aracterizes itself for its respectful silence, for its ability to contemplate, admire and be deeply moved by the surrounding beauty. And from such ability of listening emanates her creativity, creativity which notoriously accompanies the transcendent glance on everyday things. Her works of art are thus transformed into windows through which the fresh air caresses our senses, our souls." "Hence, Vestigia fidei is not only an exhibition but a summary of all her work, of her look, of the essence of her as an artist and as a person, synthesis of an existential and vital path: a sensibility open to transcendence." "The invitation to enjoy her work is to stimulate the entrance to the thickness of the secret of creation, of nature and of the mystery which every human being is in itself.”

Dalmazio Ambrosioni  Journalist, specialized in art criticism and history of art, Switzerland

The truth is the light by which you can find your way in the dark. Kindle it. ( Rabbi Nachman of Breslov )

“According to the Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism, each of us is a vessel of light.The challenge is the choice; the capacity and potential of being able to choose: being light or being darkness. Light is hope, it is the act of creation; it is goodness, love, and truth.”

“And there it is, where we find the insistence of the artist Karina Chechik, trying to figure out, to reinvent those nooks where light passes through, trying to open spaces, creating opportunities for meeting; the only possible scenario for dialogue, for the inter-, for the space between.

" The meeting is the same dialogue between opposites, there lays the light, pure movement, incomprehensible, unapproachable. It is the dimension of holiness, light, time, movement, and action. Because the purpose of giving light is to create, is to turn on, is to illuminate. Bringing light is a way to create palaces in time; it is a way of making heaven and earth become pure unity.”

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Marisa Bergman  Director, Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires

The colour is an element that really connotes Karina Chechik's works. In the declining of the shades, in the harmonic succession of the tones, it reflects the passing of the time, the sense of history, the veil of nature, the boldness of the shapes. The colours are even vertiginous, they gradate the consistency of the physical elements thus exalting the interior perception. The light blue is not for the grass, the yellow is not for the sun, the same for the red, violet, and the grey tones. But all of them have an inner ability of vibration, of trasparency, of reflexes, of glazings that reminds us some glares in the skies painted by Turner. The light blows gently on the surfaces, animates the movements, interprets the quality of the evocation. It is a rafined, delicate, and sometimes sharp light. A light that generates from the tones and allows to distinguish the real nature of things, beyond the appearances. A light that projects a perspective of opening, of getting over all the borders, of hope.

Verónica Parselis  Filósofa. Artista. Curadora. Directora de la Escuela de Filosofía de la Universidad del Salvador

Las imágenes nos convocan a transitar, a perdernos en la intrincada experiencia del caminante. El observador deviene cómplice de la mirada del artista, tanto del flaneur perdido en los ritmos de la ciudad como del pausado andar entre vegetaciones, laberintos y sombras.

 Demorarse en el viaje se transforma en método experimental, en deambular fructífero que habilita la profunda interrogación por el misterio del tiempo. Desde ese ángulo, se logra asumir la condición de homo viator en donde el viaje se vuelve instancia espiritual y recuerda la fragilidad de la existencia. Esta exposición hace eco de las palabras de Borges: “ el arte debe ser como ese espejo / Que nos revela nuestra propia cara.