2022 DIE ECKE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO

Installation views, Hay luz en cada ventana (VIII)
Solo show, Die Ecke Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile
November 9, 2022 – January 7, 2023

Photos by Álvaro Mardones, courtesy of Die Ecke Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile

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Press release: The screen prints that I make are appropriations, re-interpretations, and re-contextualizations of designs mainly produced in the sixties and seventies, a prolific period of printed and industrial graphics worldwide. The sources – original images – coincide with perhaps the most intense moment of the Cold War and also with the appearance of simultaneous social and political movements, such as the Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Hippie movements in the United States, as well as the second wave of feminism and leftist movements in Latin America and other souths. I have looked at and borrowed images from these movements and also from advertising and graphic design; North American psychedelia has a special place, where experimentation with drugs sought to create a new form of community, from the counterculture; Japanese poster design and traditional landscape engraving, whose references range from Op-Art to Art-Nouveau; of Chilean political posters made before and during the Popular Unity; of progressive rock concert posters or early electronic music gatherings; of book and magazine covers found in Mexico City, or anywhere I come across a used bookstore. Notebooks on mathematics, biology, genetics, graph theory, physics, science fiction stories or novels by Latin American writers and poetry compilations. There are also many book covers of philosophy, social sciences, political sciences and economics, for example one titled Introduction to Structuralism, or another Psychic Disturbances, or Monetary Theory, Sexual Impulses, Social Work, Cybernetics and Society, Utopia and Experiment and there is also one titled Teaching the Black Experience. I have found images in copyright-free design books and magazines, where the images are infinite repetitions of patterns that could well come–again–from psychedelia, from optical art, from Duchamp’s Roto Rotoreliefs, from a Shippibo-Conibo fabric, from an Ikea dining room bedspread or tablecloth. My silkscreen prints present a new way of reading these references, creating images in a suspended state, between an image that seeks to be something new and an image that is suspended in its own history. New ways of being and existing.

Hay luz en cada ventana (There is Light in Every Window) is the same title of the exhibition I did at Die Ecke in the winter of 2010 and is based on a quote by Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City between 1934 and 1945. The exclamation describes the quality lighting of the first social housing in the city. The phrase carries a strong – and almost mystical – positivism, typical of the period, were architecture and urbanism were seen as tools of change on a large scale, a period that would transform and redefine New York as a modern city. This exhibition can be considered as a large-scale wall installation, which is the 8th version of a series of silk-screen wall installations that started right in 2010.

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