What is the meaning of painting?
To me painting has become a way of time traveling, forth and back. As society goes fast and blindly forward, through each layer of oil color I go back on my path to rethink what I've done. This is a space to analyze the time being and to see through every week of drying a possibility to balance through each touch what is going on within me and my paintings.
Because of these six years of painting, because of this exercise of temporary movement, I got to confront and heal the child and teenager I was during the dictatorship in Chile and my later life in Finland. Now I can appreciate the present through my singularity and through my otherness.
In a world where images overwhelm and saturate the screens I use what is left, what seems insignificant, what is transmitted without any sense of belonging through the Internet, applications and social media. In a world where images are rapidly worn off, I capture what appears to be alive with my cellphone: from paintings I see during a visit to museums and galleries, random magazines at offices and receptions, reading a novel at a café, the shape and shine of a tree in a park or the heathers I keep in my balcony during winter time.
Through this exercise of surfaces and capture I return a meaning to the images. I'm specially drawn by their formal aspects: hues, materials, shapes in portraits and landscape, as well as those subtle details eluding the gaze of the unaware; simple matters of Nature like the strange and long stem of a flower. I translate them by using an intense palette of oils and acrylics; by disproportions in some shapes and flattening and elevation of certain volumes, emphasizing shadows and lights. My brush-strokes are on the thick side and also clear; there is where I am, then is when I am present. I conduct a constantly changing translation which has been a mark in my life and still is.
From that talking, writing, observing and painting otherness. When I meet people in this continent I experience a lot of misunderstanding and less concord; I find myself trying to understand the northern hemisphere and me as a part of it. I disappear under the next layer of color. I merge with the shadow I paint which appears under the spoon on the set table in my mother's apartment; I merge with the veins in the leaf of an Anthurium painted with oil colors drying on the easel on a rainy day, here in the capital of Finland; reminding me of the capital of Chile, Santiago, and the backyard of my grandmother which was always calm, green and full of flowers. There is where I am, then is when I am present again.
April, 2024