Jeffly Gabriela Molina Venezuela, b. 1989

In 2018, Kavi Gupta presented the first major solo exhibition of paintings by Venezuela-born, Chicago-based artist Jeffly Gabriela Molina. Molina’s paintings wrestle with the alchemy between seeing and feeling—that is to say, between precise optical perception and the fleeting moments of memory and emotion that fill everyday life. Each composition is an amalgam of poetry, memory, personal experience and communal relationships—a metaphysical data point; a captured glimpse of a half remembered day dream.

Like Marianne Moore, Molina’s favorite poet, who was known both for imaginative language and precise diction, Molina developed an aesthetic position that is both poetic and structured. Her work is haunting, dreamlike, and conceptually open—yet meticulously constructed and thought out. She is inspired by the challenge of expressing ideas, which are inherently abstract, as pictures, which are inherently concrete. She strives to make each picture come alive, so viewers will see in it something that reminds them of themselves.