Manuela Armand is a young Venezuelan artist born in Mérida, Venezuela, in 1982, who develops an investigation on the perception of the landscape through painting. Coming from a family environment very close to art, she graduated in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Art of the Universidad de Los Andes in 2007, and she did internships in the painting workshops of the Instituto Universitario de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón (Iuesapar), in Caracas. She is currently a professor in the Department of Visual Arts of the Faculty of Art of the Universidad de Los Andes.

The proposal of Armand aims, in her own words, to “capture the ephemeral, the instant, the transitory and fleeting of a landscape, and at the same time the memory of it”. She stops on the constant changes of the environment, in natural phenomena that are not apprehensible due to their ethereal quality. With subtle acuity she amplifies what is insignificant in the immeasurable dimensions of the natural space. Armand pauses in the tiny areas of the wide horizon.

The visual reading of the transparency of air, atmospheric pressure, currents of the wind, of the climatic changes, of the rain and the sun, are expressed on the totality of the support with technical skill, with the use of acrylic, and sometimes with the use of collage or charcoal. Through free and material abstraction, she translates into images the colorless and insipid air, mixed with the strong presence of light and clear chromatic nuances. Lighting and color are the registers of a language that with reduced expressive elements becomes clearly sensory and intimate. This work returns us to the immateriality of the phenomena that go unnoticed by the overwhelmingness of modern life and the development of large cities, it returns us to a sensitive connection with nature.

Armand has had outstanding participation and recognition in recent years, among them, we could mention the Premio de adquisición of the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo received in 2019, on the occasion of the Premio Eugenio Mendoza 15 exhibition, whose work became part of the Latin American art collection of the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo in Washington. Her work is referenced in the 11 dibujantes publication, published by El Toro de la Casa Ediciones, Franco Contreras collection, edited by the Universidad de Los Andes in 2012. In 2017 she was part of the Luciano Benetton Collection and she was included in the Imago Mundi Collecction: A shining constant in the artistic sky contemporary artists from Venezuela, edited by Antiga Edizioni, Italy. She is represented in private collections in the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, France, England, the Czech Republic, Argentina and Venezuela.

Anny Bello