The Representation of Landscape.
The present exhibition emerges from the need to deepen in the creative possibilities of the process that allows nature to be captured in an artwork. Three artists look for paths for a new look of the landscape as a conceptual reconstruction. Three views about the same topic: the untamed beauty of the Chilean Patagonia, final landscape.
The artists place themselves in the middle ground between the pictorial conception and photography and find with success different solutions in relation with the natural model. In Chilean art history, the landscape has been a privileged genre. The valleys of the central zone have been recurrently painted, but the powerful Austral sceneries have not. For that matter, this topic is assumed as a pressing commitment.
It’s a solid job that sustains itself because of the sincerity of its proposals, without resorting to artifices imposed by fashion. José Viviani and María José Concha –who share the experience of living in the Austral zone- along with Patricia Claro, interpret the incomparable beauty of nature not yet contaminated, and at the same time we perceive a warning because of its fragileness and the danger to its destruction.
María José Concha’s notion of landscape aesthetics takes her to a formal purity. The relationship that she establishes with nature translates in essential landscapes. The arrangements of the elements are configured in a markedly horizontal structuring where in many occasions appears the lonely Patagonian tree as the main note. It is abstracted with great refinement in the extent that it’s installed within the landscape. The reduction of the chromatic spectrum, the gestural stroke and the rhythm of the stroke give her paintings an unusual expressive force and talks to us of a mature formal conception.
Patricia Claro shows us a great sensitivity and capacity of observation. It is a slow and patient job. The artist’s view selects a calm water frame as a reflected surface and elaborates a pictorial composition according to it. It is the surrounding that defines the image. The heavy vegetation, the ice and the sky over the water, reflect in fugitive and fragile forms, where the light effects play a fundamental role.
The landscape genre in photography has important implications that manifest themselves from its beginnings as an explosive and artistic mean. José Viviani’s images are the result of a very personal search, achieving a moving atmosphere where the landscape gains a poetic dimension. He makes use of technical mechanisms like the diffuse filter and long time of exposing, putting emphasis in the light and shadow contrasts. When men appear inserted in the landscape, it does in full communion with it.
We are in front of three sensitive views of nature representation that move us deeply, a hard challenge before such beautiful surrounding. It is a visual symphony where techniques and styles are put together and complement the different sensitivities that reinterpret the landscape captured from their personal vision.
Beatriz Huidobro Hott
Art Historian
