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Enunciados de la artista: (…)My abstractions are composed of pieces of my life that surge while at work. Dreams or realities, I never separate my artwork from my personal life. In the process of applying the textures and the colors, some images or a story show. The "esgrafiado" in the surface has to do with my intention of penetrating into the spirit of the matter, thus, capturing my experiences in a form of a diary. My intuitive form of work allows images to grow and be revealed. In this way of working sometimes ideas arise that I am not prepared to explore or reveal, so I cancel and bury them until a future encounter, a later time. When the images are recurrent, I integrate them to my process and work them with great passion. There is an aspect of destruction in my work also, only thru the process of creation and destruction, I can achieve this thick layer with traces and scars that has qualities of time, memory and accident (…). (Artist Statement Picó In Transit exhibition, March, 2005) (...) We live in an age where the downfall of social and moral foundations have altered the stability of our cultural roots and religious beliefs. There is a need to deeply touch our purest feelings to learn about our spiritual identity. The work I present today has that intention: to represent the current historic moment in a more universal way, with a less graphic or specific vision, thus providing a wider field for an intellectual interpretation - a work with an existentialist approach, where man is faced with numerous possibilities to establish his own judgment and decisions. A work that can express a state of mind, an specific feeling, a sensation of construction and decomposition, struggle, arousement, balance, suspicion, remains of love, pain, silence, death, tearing apart and torture, scrapings, destiny of the ephemeral and suggestion of the unity of all things. These paintings are the outcome of a years’ work, a difficult year, one of many significant changes and intense emotional struggles that have led me to think as the Virgilio of Hermann Broch “that we are only guests in our own life” or as Foix “that we live always in others’ existence”(...). (...) I am concerned that my paintings represent painting - a true plastic language: the gesture, the texture and the plasticity of the medium. In this way, the viewer can have an openness of mind that allows him to confront his own realities and enjoy an aesthetic experience. With the visual bombardment of information to which man is submitted daily, it is necessary that art provides a space for the spirit to rest and be nourished, a place that will guide him and at the same time give him answers(...). (...) My greatest inspiration is life and the way I understand it, and my best stimulus is my own work. I believe in pursuing, in a natural way, the amount of tension necessary when confronted with an intense work. I like to work free of the pressure of groups, schools and dogmas, but if they appear, I try to escape immediately. I enjoy painting not planned or analytical art. I try to work in a state of total vacuity so that I can transmit a deep psychic substance to my work so that the spontaneous and personal way of working is an inseparable consequence of the emotion of that moment. I express in my work different emotional states through forms, colors and textures, and allow my aesthetic instinct to select the possibilities and alternatives that I unconsciously realize during the creative process of my work. I believe it is necessary to avoid all conventionalisms and trust our instincts so we can reconsider the simple, basic things in life. Painting, for me, is an internal confrontation, where I leave aside the mental panorama of ways of thinking, artificial realities and false necessities. I try to recover the authentic color of the existence, one that has no opinions, suppositions or prejudices: an interior color, no matter if my painting pleases or not.” |
2005 
(…)Painting between two realities: Frances Picó's work is born of the investigation of multiple realities of life as we can see in her most recent exhibition presented at Petrus Gallery, Picó in tránsito. The artist articulates pictorially the experiences of her displacement of San Juan to New York during 2004 in a series of works of medium and big format. Her paintings, not only originate from the reflection on the contrasting realities of both cities, but they also enter a territory of realities that are beyond the visible world: her interior universe. Read more...
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2003 (…)since the beginning of her professional career, Frances Picó has given all her energy to work in an abstract way . Abstraction has suited her well in the sincere desire to express emotional, spiritual and esthetic experiences. Frances plays with forms, colors and textures to open windows to her interior world, thus allowing the spectator to find deep answers. There is a Turner quality in many of her paintings, as if we were dealing with landscape remnants with the intensity and chromatic ambiguity of a sunset. Like this particular time of the day, her works provoke the feeling of multiple sensations and emotions. Nevertheless, the esgrafiados dispersed in the canvas, born of the expressive will of the artist, recall that we are not dealing with a matter of nature but with landscapes of a very different kind that reflect towards the inside to remembrances, emotions and personal experiences. Frances Picó, points out the art critic Manuél Álvarez Lezama and we affirm with him, has reached a sophisticated maturity that justifies to position her among the good representatives of the Puerto Rican abstraction (…). (Rafael Torres Torres, Director of the San Juan Art Students League and the Contemporary Art Museum, November 4, 2003, Una pasión en dos tiempos exhibition catalogue essay – translation by T.K. James) |
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1998 |
1994  (...) Picó always gravitates toward the deeper circles of the soul, and the unknown sides of the universe. Her earthy colors, captivating sands, beiges, mustards, yellows, oranges, reds, grays,blues and blacks, and the way she plays with space, reflect a serious existentialist and aesthetic desire to understand the essential elements that surround her. Creating rich and eloquent textures is also very important for Picó. Most of the textures are quite rich and complex and combine the roughness of the scars that mark us forever and the lyricism of that sunset that ought not be forgotten. Most of her paintings are sensual and harsh, warm and silent, friendly and distant. Frances Pico’s abstractions can be seen as mysterious landscapes waiting for the miracle of life to happen. Through them, viewers feel seduction and suspicion, understand the labyrinth and the desert, experience hunger and virtue (...). (Manuel Álvarez Lezama, Frances Picó shows a serious dedication to art, The San Juan Star, February 27, 1994) |
Frances Picó presents a series of paintings realized between New York and San Juan, the trip that has turned into a five decades metaphor of going back and forth in the “guagua aerea”. And the fact is that New York, although it is not the biggest city of Puerto Rico anymore, is the excellent destination for the “nautas” of the world of art. The works are accumulating references of a stay in the city during the Summer of 2004, and the multiple personal experiences that the Big Apple offers.
