Museo Moderno
EL AZEM Karina
Precaución, 2003, 65x130

Since my initial stages as an artist, in the mid nineties, I focused on ornamental tradition
and their impact in the development of twentieth-century abstract art.
Decorative art was born many centuries before representation art, and through rhythm,
symmetry, and patterns, moral,social and religious views were conveyed.
Aesthetic functionalism resumed old debates around ornament as artifice, but for some
time we have acknowledged these manifestations with their own justifications and
references.
Gombrich claimed there are formal motifs revealed as able to fit into certain psychological
provisionsthat had not been met before; they are habits creators
In many other works, I approach the ideas of surface, pattern and repetition when filling a
given space, as a means to enter the viewer’s perception of scales, proportions and
boundaries within an architecturalspace.
I am currently engaged on notions associated to fractal geometry proposed by Mandelbrot;

they are the basis for the works I am developing. Even though they are defined by the self-
similarity principle, that is, each part contains the seed to recreate the whole, differences

from the original arise with each increasing level.
Since Ancient times we humans have linked the beauty and sacrality of some forms of Art
and Architecture to Fractals; physicist Richard Taylor even found a connection to Jackson
Pollock’s art.
Fractalsintroduce chaos, they contain noise and order.
When our minds recognize a pattern we focus on it as if it were a thing, we try to find
patterns we consider beautiful, but in order to hold them in our minds we must set aside
the rest of the fractal; in order to understand them we restrict their movement, we try to
recognize a language the same one that allows restorers to complete a piece by
extrapolation.
The production for my works begins with a “prototype” made with beads, brass cases or
different warlike materials that I glued as embroidery.
With the artisanal tradition usually attributed to women as reference, I scan these motives,
and I combine and transform them with the computer.