Nohelia Vargas is a professional artist based in Houston and Boston. She is originally from Caracacas, Venezuela but she has lived in the United States for the last 10 years. She earned her Bachelor in Fine Arts with Cum Laude honors from the University of Houston with an area of concentration in Painting and Art History. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at Tufts University’s School of Museum of Fine Arts.
Vargas is a very dynamic artist who, while keeping her studio practices, has held jobs that have allowed her to keep in touch with the contemporary art world. She is a former docent of the Blaffer Art Museum and a former manager of the Mariago Collective Art Gallery. She currently works at Berklee College of Music. In 2015, she was part of UVA’s Olympic SPIRIT exhibition in Boston City Hall’s Scollay Square Gallery and Temptation of the Mind and Body at the Crossings Gallery at the Harvard Ed Portal.
In her recent works Vargas merges abstraction with naturalistic qualities. Since she never treats the canvas as a flat surface her approach to art is somewhat traditional. In the same manner she allows the setting to be seen as a landscape or a still life. The intricate harmony of detail found on her works induce the viewer to observer, and observer deeper while he tries to decode the imaginary in front of him so familiar but yet impossible to identify.
Vargas states: “I consider my pieces to be inclusive rather than exclusive because even though they are not contained in the fabric of reality, they recreate a reality based on the viewer’s own associative powers.” The intention is to recreate a place, to build a window for the viewer that pulls him into contemplate. So the art piece is not contained within the painting itself but in that very moment in which the viewer finds himself observing, in silence and contemplating, after contemplation fill us with wonder prompts us to search for meaning and value.”
Her personal artist website is https://nohelia.squarespace.com/
