NEO

The Neo light sculptures, inspired by Neo-Geo - a conceptual art movement born in the 1980s in the United States - combine minimalism, op art and geometric abstraction. In this way, the artist Isabel Englebert works only with the essential elements, generating visual effects with pure and abstract morphologies, in which the simplicity of the forms and the linear character are the protagonists. Works of strong retinal impact, imprinted with the artist's characteristic signature.

 

Even when the figures that build the pieces are abstract, they allude to reality. This characteristic is partly drawn from the artist Peter Halley, one of the main referents of Neo-Geo, who uses geometric abstraction as a mechanism to refer to the social space of the world in which we live. Thus, in this piece, schemes and graphics of modern society are translated: squares and rectangles as "social cells", lines as social networks and communication routes.

 

Isabel Englebert establishes a relationship between the approach of the Neo-Geo movements and the current situation of how society is affected by the pandemic. During the months of confinement, the artist observed how the pandemic situation not only isolated individuals, but entire regions. Divisions and groups were generated within the country, which looked askance at each other, seeking to avoid new transmissions within their own region. For some time, it seemed that Argentina was made up of separate parts, individual regions completely partitioned from each other.