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collages, arrangements

2016 - 2021

“For Jel Suarez, collage is a procedure that extracts from existing materials possibilities of reading the past and in the process prospects vocabularies of gathering and assembly that can vivify them in the present. Her agency is exploratory and inquisitive, thus her work is always an assertion of the plenitude of the image and the potency of its excavations.”

- Carlos Quijon, 2019, exhibition notes for A will for prolific disclosures, The Drawing Room

“ — when seen as distinct objects, they may likewise be read as an array of ancient spearheads or shards of prehistoric earthenware, silently retelling the story of the hunt”

- Gary Ross Pastrana, 2019, object reader, MO_Space Gallery

“—image is pinned to texture is pinned to paper is pinned to binding; shape is printed on landscape is printed on surface. Suarez sees this repetitive process as memory akin to the digging of a past. The artist, like any other, finds herself in an archaeological duty to remember. Much like the fragments in her previous works (ranging from museum pieces to tribal relics), the merging is logical: marble quarry sees itself in the copy of its own texture, prints itself in the hallucinatory topography of the marble surface. It’s this repetition, the habitual, which allows a sedimentation of the past that Suarez continues with her previous whole-as-fragments.”

- Raya Martin, 2018, Of Memories and Records, Of Relics and Replicas, Of Monuments and Memorabilia (exhibition notes for Traces by Which We Remember), West Gallery

“Suarez's interest is a relational one, her work as though depictions of moving objects in equilibrium. Her work for the exhibition utilizes classical leitmotif, reconstructing old masterpieces as systems of weight, tension, and body.”

- Owel Alvero, 2017, Notes On Assembly, Forging/ Foraging, ArtInformal Gallery

“She cuts through stones, clears through materials. Her cutting is an unconscious process: forming, painting, sculpting. A casual method of sculpting sculptures in the yard of masters.

—there is no subject to speak of. None of a body to refer to. The lines are bodies themselves, in the way that Nature produces her materials. Neither invisibility nor nothingness, rather, existence, existing, material, form.”

- Raya Martin, 2016, Yet We Continue To Build There, The Structure, Vinyl On Vinyl Gallery