Colombian painter based in Toronto, Eslava develops a practice centered on the observation of landscape as a point of departure for abstraction. Her work emerges from a direct experience with nature, where she collects visual fragments—changes in light, organic surfaces, atmospheres, textures, and transitions—that are later transformed in the studio. Through this process, the initial image shifts from the descriptive toward the sensory, opening a space where landscape ceases to be a specific place and becomes a visual and emotional experience.

In her series Connections, nature is the primary source of inspiration for abstraction. Landscape is not represented as a recognizable setting, but as a system of relationships between color, gesture, and matter. Through this observation, Eslava translates elements of nature into pictorial structures that evoke movement, energy, and transformation. The series proposes landscape as an open field of connections between perception, memory, and emotion, where the external world filters into the internal and is reorganized through painting.

The titles of her works play an important role in this process, functioning as subtle clues that expand what remains open within the image. Rather than describing what is represented, the titles reveal an association, a thought, or an experience that accompanies the act of painting. In Synapsis, for example, the reference to neural connections establishes a direct link to an intimate dimension of her life: the ongoing search for new connections and possibilities within her daughter’s physical rehabilitation process. The work thus becomes a reflection on connection as a possibility for transformation, where personal experience intersects with a broader inquiry into the relationships between nature, body, mind, and memory.

Andrea Eslava’s work is constructed within this space of uncertainty: between what we see and what we remember, between the territory we inhabit and the territory we carry within us. Her paintings do not seek to offer a definitive image of nature, but rather to create a space where viewers can recognize their own forms of connection with the world.

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