Sissely Cordero Barrios is an artist and art educator from Uruguay, South America.
Her practice operates at the intersection of artistic creation and education, exploring materials, processes, and ideas that foster reflection, critical engagement, and meaning-making.
This website presents a selected body of work that reflects her commitment to art as a transformative practice. Her artistic philosophy aligns with
the ideas articulated by Luis Camnitzer:
“I am an artist, and, one way or another, everything I do is art… I wish that artists would consider themselves also as educators, and educators
also as artists. Otherwise, artists are reduced to working on self-therapy, and educators continue working as trainers and transmitters of information.”
Working from the porous territory between light and shadow, her practice explores the instability of perception — the space where forms emerge, dissolve, and resist fixed interpretation. Light and shadow operate as active agents, shaping psychological presence, memory, and emotional density. Figures are constructed not as representations but as encounters: bodies carrying weight, silence, tension, and unresolved narratives.
Painting becomes an arena of negotiation rather than depiction. Dense surfaces, restrained palettes, and sculptural treatments of the human form articulate a language grounded in materiality and presence. The work inhabits a threshold — between visibility and obscurity, intimacy and distance, stillness and latent movement. In this borderland, meaning is not delivered but activated, inviting the viewer into a reflective, perceptual, and often unsettling dialogue.
GALERÍA TATO
