Aldanondo is an Argentine-American abstract expressionist painter, originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, she grew up in Astoria, Queens.
She is a certificate student of the rigorous and prestigious four year Fine Arts Certificate program at The Art Students League of New York, where other artists such as Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keefe, Mark Rothko, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeoisie, also studied.
There, Aldanondo studies with renowned abstract art masters Larry Poons, Ronnie Landfield, and James Little focusing on color, abstract design ideas, painting and sketching from live models, and more recently also exploring other mediums alongside other art masters.
She won a Merit Scholarship by The Art Students League and was the winner of the Leonard Rosenfeld Award. In recent years she also won a juried competition, juried by the Milken Family Foundation, the Newport Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum.
Aldanondo’s main source of inspiration lies within emotion, the city, memories and the exploration between the relationship between personal identity and the physical spaces were we find ourselves, and how our spaces and surroundings influence emotion, our perception of our own identity, and our awareness of such.
When asked about her work, she said that she believes her work and what it means should be something each viewer decides, it is an open ended invitation to a conversation, to think about and to ask what the painting might mean to the viewer.
Her work is an invitation to an otherwise unseen reality, emerging from emotion and from within.
She believes the questions asked about her work are questions that actually may relate to the viewer, and the conversation and engagement of the viewer with the painting.
Susana’s work has developed into a spontaneous flow of color and space that develops from simple structures into elaborate compositions of color, lines and space.
The vibrancy of New York City and music, primarily tango & jazz inspire her work as she feels them both deeply rooted in her identity.
Continuous line motifs and organized elaborate structures feature widely in Susana’s paintings; the artist is interested in the concept of synchronicity, exploring emotion through music, the here and now, and the connection between music and the visual art forms.
The lines which are prominent in her work may also make reference to her Latin-American culture, speficically related to Argentina, and to the iconic ‘fileteado’ style characterstic of the art and tango connection of Buenos Aires, Argentina; but may also reference the synchronicity of life, the paths we take, or the energy of a given moment or sound.
She has been subject to collaborations with musicians, composers and scholars of the Julliard Music School in New York City, Columbia University, later contributing to the National Arts Diversity and Integration Association for their inaugural Art Currents Exhibit that integrated jazz and the visual arts in Harlem, NY where she was invited as the leading visual artist of the exhibit.
Her work was selected for the group exhibition “Creating Joy”, featuring works of art inspired by music at the Susquehanna Art Museum.
Other collaborations exploring sound and visual arts include the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, the Noa Font Quartet in an exploration of improvised reactions to music and the visual art forms; Aldanondo painted to live to the music of the musicians and composers who also improvised their music inspired by Aldanondo’s painting; ,exploring the human connection to both through emotion in the present moment as part of an exhibition “Sound & Sight: A Duet” presented by The Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and curated by NAscentNY in a private event and exhibition in Brooklyn Heights, NY.
As part of an exhibition, she was invited to paint to tango by AvanTango and Grammy nominee Pablo Aslan at the Lower East Side, New York.
She collaborated with New York City based tango orchestras Cuartentango and Suarez-Paz Tango during their celebratory events of the centennial honoring renowned tango composer, Astor Piazzola. She has also painted live at a Gala at the Sheraton Hotel, in New York.
She is known for painting in the streets of New York City, she is a pioneer of pleinair painting of large scale non-representational work, which she paints throughout different areas of the city, which led to her series “City As Studio” consisting of her best work of nonrepresentational painting painted in streets of the city of New York. Through this experience she also began exploring the human relationship between the art forms and the visual advertisements often found on the walls where she paints, as an added factor to our surroundings and our perceptions of the self, and the physical spaces around us.
