[2] The artists of “Los Novísimos” – including Allora & Calzadilla, Fernando Colón Gonzalez, Yvelisse Jiménez, Arnaldo Morales, and Miguel Trelles – often use mapping terminology, such as the metaphor of the “axis,” discussed by key Latin American cultural critics such as Monica Amor, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Gerardo Mosquera, among others.
"[4] Collazo-Llorens adheres to the notion of non-linear narratives as in the writing of such authors as Julio Cortázar, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Don Delillo, as well as to theories of perception – based on the dislocation of time and place through travel – espoused by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Mitchell Schwarzer.
She takes the language of cartography – part of her familial as well as artistic environment – and links it to digital communication and code-switching (the splicing of Spanish and English), working it through intersections that are both systematic and random: replete with directed thought and disconnected noise.
Small but intensely powerful, they are compact expressionistic worlds comfortable simultaneously in the language of the bodily and the schematic.”[8] Curator Laura Roulet sees Collazo-Llorens's paintings as revealing “a post-minimalist aesthetic, with the systematic organization of Hanne Darboven or Eva Hesse, and the calligraphic mark making and erasures of Cy Twombly or Brice Marden.”[9] The methodology of these subjective and intimate drawings broadens into expansive mappings either on canvas or directly on the wall.
[10] MacQueen sees “this unfolding of space between geographical coordinates [as] an exposure of the vectors that chart personal experience.”[11] For Collazo-Llorens drawing does not remain confined to or isolated by the sheet of paper or canvas but merges with mixed media and video into elaborate installations.
This effect repeats the video images exponentially and infinitely…these repetitions layer and decay with every loop, to the point of being un-viewable/unreadable.”[13] Nayda Collazo-Llorens worked as studio assistant to the conceptual artist Antoni Muntadas from 2001 until 2006.
“I’m neither critiquing technology nor supporting it,” says the artist, “rather, exploring the contemporary reality it has produced.”[18] In 2014, Collazo-Llorens was recognized with a fellowship from the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership to undertake practice-based research resulting in a temporary site-specific text-based wall installation for the newly completed ACSJL.