Excerpt from Gladys Triana, Art Nexus, January-March 2005

Julia P Herzberg, Independent Curator and Art Critic

Gladys Triana’s new body of work features three wall installations, two of which are drawings, the third, photographs. Each series of drawings presents the artist’s hands holding objects commonly used in everyday life. Of special interest are the two series of 121 drawings on embroidery hoops, one of which is installed in a triangular format and the other in a loosely defined paragraph format. The images in the triangular format feature the hand holding or presenting the object, as if to signal its significance; the images in the paragraph format feature two hands activating the object, as if it were in use.

Triana seems to have chosen her hands to signal life’s thrust, its vital sign, and she makes this point by engaging her hands in routine movements with ordinary objects. She seems to be saying that there is something paradoxically special about recording a fragment of an ordinary activity. In calling attention to mostly domestic objects found either in the artist’s home or her studio, Triana marks a moment in life, one of the many countless activities performed in a routine manner.

Excerpt from Gladys Triana, Art Nexus, September-December 1995

Monica Amor, Independent Curator and Art Critic

I would suggest that Triana’s emphasis on the structural and discursive devices that have, since the beginning of modernity, shaped out perception of the world, underlines the constructive character of memory and identity. While recent artistic production and much of the contemporary criticism has focused on art as a redemptive process and a way of representing national and cultural identity, works like Triana’s seem to think of art in terms of contingent models of representation always bounded to the discursive structures of society.

Excerpt from Gladys Triana, Art Nexus, July-September 1997

Christine Frérot, Art Critic, Paris

Triana, a Cuban-American artist, presents her work through the instability of the ephemeral, a firm and delicate persistence within her divided identity. In these new works, the conception of a mental space is articulated through the superimposition of various surfaces or spaces—geographical and mental, pictorial and technical, historical and esoteric, political and poetic. In this way, the ludic dimension becomes the true metaphor of the meaning of the work

Excerpt from Gladys Triana, Movement-Fragmentation. (Catalog introduction)

Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, June 11-March 3, 1990

John Stringer, Director, Visual Arts, Americas Society

Exaggerated close-focus and frozen action are reminiscent of snapshots, but the violent oppositions of complimentary colors and broken patterns of energetic brushwork obviously belong to the 80s, showing how in the last decade, expressionist fervor has triumphed over the impartial precision of photography. A similar energy is conveyed by the giant collages of Gladys Triana, but the mood is quite different. Through fragmentation, Triana’s pieces are much more abstract; their darker palette evokes a pensive and introspective mood. They are reflective and deal with internal psychological states rather than outside outward displays of emotions.