Arts and Letters
Sunday December 28, 2008

Patricia Claro y Ricardo Maffei:

WALDEMAR SOMMER

Amongst ourselves we frequently don’t trust the realisms of the present age. There are several reasons for this that are worthy of consideration. These vary from the lack of synthesis, responsible for the boring accumulation of details, to the grave subordination of the formal narrative values. All this is translated to the inability of suggestions and the excess of evidence. Luckily, we can count with a few painters loyal to a recognizable reality. They are able to transcend it with valid insinuations. Two of them, completely different from one another, are being exhibited during these days. One is in at the beginning of her trajectory while the other is in the middle of his production.

Let’s start with the first one. She depicts the calm and flow of waters with its lights and shadows, brightness and transparencies, with reflections of its surroundings. This is the genuine theme of Patricia Claro which is now being shown in Galería Animal. It is reduced to nine big paintings and one great horizontal triptych. There is also a video with a very adequate sonorous support whose notes are prolonged in different planes and where the sound of water welds with electronic music.
In the ways of impressionists, an affectionate study of aquatic nature appears in these oil paintings on fabric. Sometimes, the placid and watery blue surfaces, with touches of green and black, pick up the surrounding leafy vegetation and makes it its own. It also adds its own tones of green, ocher and orange. They probably capture de most beautiful examples of the exhibition.
On the other hand, Ricardo Maffei shows recent pastels on paper (2004-08) in the Galería A.M. Malborough. If before he drew attention by his small cup of color over wrinkled paper theme, now he undertakes seven developments over that argument, making it richer. Now, the round hard object lies over cloth and over marble. He sometimes confronts a crushing machine or a glass of water.

Other characters of his are the morbid superposed fabrics where the exquisite sensuality of the diagonal folds seems to talk to the extended quilts in a game of horizontals and verticals, of straight and curved lines and of false contrasts in the material. With this, the present still life transcends the anecdote through an effective reinforcement of the plastic ingredient. Maffei also stands out in two other aspects. Unlike the most famous realist Chilean painter, we have his impeccable administration of cuts and limits of each one of his frontal visions.

As far as color goes, his chromatic accords always emerge extremely beautiful with confrontations of complementary colors, especially of yellow and violet or violet blues. At the same time, his evocative backgrounds stand out rich with enigmatic signs, stripes and spots which introduce certain instability to the certainty of the protagonist cloth. Despite all this, the painter has never before shown a greater genuineness or visual lightness in his themes.

KEYS: Pause in the subordination that the narrative ingredients suffer, so detrimental to realism, in the hands of Claro and Maffei, managing this way to prevail the aquatic lyricism en the first one and the elegance of forms in the second.