By Alexxa Gotthardt
As Cristina Camacho will tell you, her paintings have personalities. A visit to Chelsea this summer confirms the anthropomorphic impact of the 28-year-old artist’s canvases—fresh from her Columbia MFA studio—that flutter, interlace, and extend into space. The day before the opening of her first solo show, Artsy visited Camacho at Praxis’s luminous second-floor space, nestled amongst the city’s most established galleries. She spoke calmly and candidly about her work as if she’d been making it her entire life.
Camacho has, in fact, been playing around with paint since a very young age. Encouraged by an artist aunt, Camacho experimented with color and shape during holiday visits to her extended family’s home in Medellín, some nine hours by car from her hometown of Bogotá, Colombia. Further spurred by parents who work in the textile industry and a brother in architecture, Camacho studied design, with a minor in art, as an undergrad.
Left unsatiated by the Bogotá university’s art offerings, she made her way to New York soon after graduation, where she jumped between classes at different schools, driven by a desire to experiment with as many materials as possible. “I needed to know how to paint—to get the know the material itself,” explained Camacho. “So I tried oil, acrylic, watercolor, embroidery, and more.” She landed on painting as her chosen medium, but her approach quickly veered from a traditional color-to-canvas relationship.
