Magazine Arte Al Límite
Interview
March-April 2008

After graduating from the university in 2005 as Bachelor of Visual Arts, these last two
years have been of intense activity: two exhibitions, the making of the Fondart project
(National Fund of Art Development), now you prepare to participate in ArteBa in May
(Buenos Aires fair), for September, collective exhibitions in Washington and New York,
and also an individual exhibition during December in Animal Gallery of Santiago. How
have you coped with the rapid recognition? Do you think that your previous Design
formation, career studied between 1978 and 1982, in a certain way hurried your artistic
maturity?
The decision of studying a second career, Bachelor of Arts UC, consolidates an artistic
formation that joins with my pictorial proposal, methodological experiences applied in
design projects, , knowledge of diverse techniques experimented for years in painting
workshops and the development of a theoretical project surrounding my artwork that
relates with a particular view towards the landscape. The recognition towards my work, in
these first years of exhibitions, really motivates me to keep on in the search of that
contemporary image, elaborated through a personal manipulation of the tradition painting
techniques, confirming me that an artist must show his or her artwork only when he or
she really represents it, even if he or she previously has to walk a long road to achieve it.

Under the topic of landscapes, your painting achieves to bring together two opposite
currents; the realism and abstraction. How did you come up with this symbiosis?
The representation of a landscape’s detail, in this case the water and its reflections, implies
to rebuild as a total that anonymous piece of a place, where the real world ends and the
canvas starts, showing a new reality processed by my view. This landscape represented as
an “idea” finally translates into pure painting. It is here where the abstraction to tension
the limit between what’s photographed and represented appears, where the strategy is
figurative but also using a forced framing. The image then becomes a visual texture where
the light forms the drawing, capturing the essential characteristics and parting the artwork
away from merely description.

From the photographed image to the final artwork, how is the process both technical and
conceptual?
Although there’s an existent image initially captured by the digital means, in the
construction of the frame the force is emphasized and the manual valor, being the hand a
basic gesture, the artwork’s protagonist. After a long photo selection taken personally in
water places, a work that searches to activate a reflexive contemplation around the work
and its process starts. Successive layers of paint are added forming a smooth thickness,
where the color depth and pictorial material are finally the same support for the image.
The representation, then, is from a cut of a water view that acts like a natural mirror
amplifying in a scale one to one, reuniting the surrounding’s colors and where the
spectator can extend farther the limits of the painting’s image of an absent place.

What drives you away and what makes you closer to hyper-realistic painting?
The perception of a long distance glance and the closed-up look of my artwork it’s what
differentiates me from the hyper-realism, while my approach to this style is stated by the
reality of the colors. The landscape topic activates in my work a transformation of the
model itself, centered in the pictorial process, that because of its characteristics it confuses
the spectator in the “how” of the image construction. Standing far away, it’s perceived
almost like a photo, but the close relationship with the painting reveals a layer cut
treatment, geometric, of thick material, and superimposed to a background of an almost
nonmaterial aspect, what necessarily puts in doubt the pictorial representation.