The Astral Projection Series are paintings, acrylic on canvas small and medium formats, which somehow draws on early modernist styles such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Neo-romanticism.
Natasha express her inner world from a mystical point of view, while projecting herself as a contemporary woman who faces a social and emotional context similar to the one that inspired those masters to create such impressive landscapes. Thus she focuses on her own contemporary reality, to subtly reflect on our chaotic times of deceiving politics and unstable socio-economic environment.
The Postmodern era and the “globalization” that ensued brought about new concepts and tools to try rationalizing developed societies. Natasha faces those new invisible methods of control through the tools of the old masters: a deep spirituality encapsulated by great masses of color and shapes that spell a dramatic contradictory relationship between the natural elements amid a grim atmosphere. It is precisely her playing with a vast array of hues and tones of chromatic grays which allows her to create a heavy synecdoche of these turbulent times we are living. Then that sensitive aesthetic of landscape and seascape painting she inherited, correlates to the very current narrative that crystallizes in these amazingly contemporary artworks.

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Rafael López-Ramos

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Personally, I don’t think an artist must explain or describe his or her artworks. Artworks must be created, displayed and interpreted by each one of you, according to your own perspective.
But I still believe a general overview of the circumstances and the historical moment in which each artist lives, must somehow be represented in his work.  So, lets talk a little bit of those details.
For years I have worked the theme of landscape, approaching it in various stages of my life through different styles and with diverse purposes.

In the late eighties I went to live on Carenas Key, a small island in the Cienfuegos Bay, with no running water or electricity. Fishing on its shores, I found fragments of dishes or old objects that had been dumped there over the time. Asking some local fishermen, I was told that this tiny island, had been used long ago by the Pirates from the Caribbean to hide and repair their ships. Hence some of those fragments could be from that time.
Then I began to research the subject, settlements in the city and its history, inspiring me to create art with a very interesting and historical motivation.  Since then I have always tried to base the born of my artworks on a previous research of the historical, political, social and cultural reality of the places where I’m living.
Years later I also lived in an area that belonged to the native community, named Tsawwassen in British Columbia, Canada. I learned about their customs and ways of life, manual skills, totems and carvings. The ocean view from that area quite leaves you breathless, as well as all the way along the Georgia Strait, going North.

For the second time in my life I was so lucky to stay few days on another small island with no other connection to the civilization that some boat that eventually came to its shores. It was Valdes Island one of several that still keep the names of their Spanish explorers, in the Georgia Strait.
It was there that I could clearly see for the first time in my life the giant Milky Way, in the middle of an absolute darkness and countless stars, from the deck of the boat where we had arrived. It is a unique moment in life and it connected me, right away with nature. The inner landscape and its nature, is a map that is mixed in other dimensions.

Years later my husband and I came to live in Miami and just arriving, tried to do the usual research for history, ancient settlements and so on… A friend of mine, stopped me abruptly into the local reality.

“Here you come to work –she said- and if you want to find a good job you have to start by changing many things in yourself: First of all, let your hair grow longer, fix it and dye it, fix your nails and maybe your nose, put some silicone ... etc. You know !!
Then I understood that could dig a little deeper into the Miami society and the historical moment in which I was living. I looked up, read it and decided to incorporate into my works, elements of the female psychology used by contemporary institutions to manipulate an acceptance or rejection according to certain aesthetic values.
The Animas and Animus, the conscious abandonment to the impulses of the unconscious, the archetypes according to Jung. Assumed consciously to release impulses conscienceless, who like contemporary woman was expressing through my work, I refused  turn in the absurd regulations suggested by a society that still remains seeing women as objects of desire or as a servant for cleaning and procreation.

From the mid-nineteenth century there was a proliferation of social, cultural and political phenomena, generated by historical moments. Industrial Revolutions speed up some changes in the lives of many immigrants who were forced to resort to new spaces and ways, to finally adapt to the requirements of the new era.
European painters of the time, transited from one to another movement and styles, such as Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism and so on, all of them with their differences and similitude, assuming an attitude towards their own reality; convulsive or hopeless / passive resignation or active creation. A look at a social bankruptcy, economic expectations of improvement and nationalism. A variable point of view from both wings.

Back then the Romanticism, expressed the desire for personal freedom, its passions and instincts, subjectivity and imposition of feeling over reason, irrational  recurrences, imagination, the chaos, intense emotions, the use of color and brushstroke, casting with subjective eye the objective world. Meanwhile the Impressionism attempted to capture the light and the moment, regardless of the identity of what they must cast.  Creation coming deeper and become pure soul no matter what is going on. The human being should survive in conjunction to the nature and make it beautiful and stronger.

Then living a historic moment and flying into my current social reality here in North America. Specifically Miami, with the speed and convulsion of the construction machinery, building more and more and forcing some communities to a process of gentrification. Landscapes and nature are disappearing.
Some local artist are adjusting their artworks to aesthetic standards according to the requirements of the Real State market. Cheap and fast. Elaborated concepts and profound meanings are blurring as a fog in a remote internal  landscape.

I’m placing the philosophy of Carl Jung's "consciously surrender to the impulses of the unconscious" and decided –as an artist- to play the spiritual roll as a contemporary woman who is not and object (in opposition and conjunction) painting imaginary landscapes, with the same spirit and emotions that moved those European painters long ago.

Melancholy, nostalgia of a past?... Internal reflections. I do strongly believe, that we are in need of making the entire planet, not great, but better yet.

​                                    Natasha Perdomo Bermúdez

October,  2016