The Importance of Imagination

The world is a classroom. People spend their lives immersed in classes ranging from daily tasks and societal norms, to basic mathematics and physics. While we are young, the rate of learning is explosive with an exponential curve, which for many, will plateau upon reaching a certain degree of establishment in life. The world becomes familiar with age and wisdom.

I find it a rather depressing thought to imagine reaching a flat line and loosing the sense of wonderment and awe that stem from profound moments of realization. Can knowledge and experience become fuel to ignite a different type of learning? Can a work of art inspire new deep learning, which can only be gained through abstract thinking, or IMAGINATION?

The awfully fantastic paintings and monoprints by Rebeca Mendoza and Valeria Vilar breach these topics to answer the question with a strong resounding answer: Yes.

Mendoza’s abstract paintings record accounts of every day life and incorporate simultaneity that sweeps you away in abstract thinking. Likewise, Vilar’s quasi-abstract paintings seem to exist on the edge of reality and fantasy, weaving together strings of thought that provoke unexpected questions.

In the classroom of life, Mendoza and Vilar assign the viewer a challenging task: to find harmony between the familiar and mundane and the abstract and unknown. Viewers must follow their intuition and engage in the game of IMAGINATION to separate themselves from preconceived ideas about art. Their work challenges us to allow this way of seeing the world to evolve and spill over to our thinking in all arenas of life – outside of art – to entice an exceedingly rich and fortuitous path into the future.