Collective Chile

 

“NEITHER PENALTY OR FEAR” Collective

 

The exhibition "Neither sorrow nor fear" takes as its title an impressive work by Raul Zurita located in the Atacama desert, 57 kilometers south of Antofagasta. That phrase is written in that territory with enormous letters (the height of each one is 250 meters) and it is one of the most impressive land-art interventions of all those that have been carried out in Latin America. The power of the statement is added to the forcefulness of the intervention, as if it were an attempt to exorcise the worst or even to invoke an art in which the cathartic was not decisive. However, restlessness, fear or the sinister, that is, the familiar and inhospitable, do not cease to haunt creative activity. To some extent art criticism or even history, as Warburg thought, can function as a seismogram, fixing earth tremors, accounting for what causes the earth to fracture. For the first Chilean Triennial, Fernando Castro Flórez curated the exhibition “El terresmo de Chile” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in which he tried to take advantage of Heinrich von Kleist's literary pretext. Now in the Blanca Soto gallery, he selects again some Chilean artists without the intention of making any “generational” definition. The important thing is to show the vitality and energy of contemporary Chilean art, as has also been revealed in the impressive book by Gerardo Mosquera “Copy an Eden”.

 

The artists included in the exhibition are: Eugenio Dittborn, undoubtedly one of the most prestigious Latin American artists who will participate in the "Cocido Crudo" exhibition at the MNCARS and will hold an important retrospective at the New Museum, Fernando Prats, with his singular form of “painting” with smoke, fixing the traces of the real, Nicolás Franco, a young and restless creator who goes from installation to photography, Claudio Correa, concerned about marginality, Diego Opazo, photographer of the ruinous, Patrick Hamilton, allegorist of architecture and violence or Demian Schopft with an approach in which cybernetics, philosophy or the revision of traditional painting from photographic criteria come together. For the exhibition, the artist Arturo Cariceo has developed a series of interventions in a blog that will be operational from the day of the opening.

 

This exhibition is an exceptional opportunity to get to know the work of some Chilean artists, capable of carrying out, with enormous rigor and critical commitment, works in a country that endured the cruelty of the dictatorship and is undergoing important cultural, social and political transformations. . Without any doubt, Chilean art deserves attention, especially in the context of the recent interest of some Spanish museum institutions in Latin American contributions to the contemporary aesthetic debate.