3 Chielan Artists You Need to Know
After an outdoor packed week in Patagonia, the thing I was craving most when I returned to the city was a stroll through an art museum. Fortunately, I was able to get into two, the Museo de Ralli Santiago and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The Museo de Ralli Santiago was completely open to the public. When I arrived I was the only person there - they literally had to turn the lights on for me. There was no information to hand out so I took tons of photos, sans flash, to research later. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes was a different experience. You have to reserve your spot 24 hours in advance and you are only allowed one hour in the museum. They have employees walking around to give you a countdown to the end of your hour. Much of the museum was closed off but their temporary exhibits were open. The space is huge and since each hour group is only allowed 25 people max (with folks under the age of 14 not being allowed) I rarely ran into people.
The art in Latin America is rich and diverse. After visiting these two museums there were three Chilean artists that stood out to me:
Juan Martínez Bengoechea
Matilde Pérez
Alfredo Jaar
Juan Martínez Bengoechea
Juan is a Chilean artist and graphic designer. I first saw his work at the Ralli Museum. It took me by surprise since the characters in his paintings are in clothes from the 20s and 30s - which I love - but they are placed in real and unreal settings. Men stacking chairs in a field, a sheep feeding its lamb at the feet of a stoic man and girl outside a factory in a desert, and a man with a bird resting on his arm to name a few. In 2016 Juan did a few paintings using characters from the popular show Downton Abbey. You can see in his work from then on is peppered with familiar faces. I really liked the use of darker colors that give it a Norman Rockwell feel but from a dream. Each image made me stop and piece together a story behind it. When art makes you do that you know you are looking at something special. To use Juan’s words, “These are digital montages, in which humans generally appear in an open, wide, landscape plane, accompanied by ancient objects, generally arranged in such a way as to suggest a natural situation but with a certain artificial flavor, a dislocation, a out of sync that is not always easy to verbalize. It is not about impossible situations, rather, about improbable situations, it is in a certain sense a real surrealism.”
Matilde Pérez
Matilde is really special. The room that I stayed in at the AWA Hotel in Northern Patagonia had a print of hers. I did not know the artist at the time since there was no name. I thought it was art from the native Mapuche tribe. A week later, I found myself face to face with her piece Sin título, the same piece from my room. I couldn’t believe it! Matilde was born in Santiago in 1916, although, according to her friends, she herself claimed to have been born in 1920. (My love of things from the 20s and 30s, including people who claimed to be born then, continues). She pushed all limits of art and truly fell in love with kinetic art, which appears to move as you look at it. When she passed away in 2014, it was huge news. Not only had Matilde made her mark in the art world as a woman in a true man’s world, but she did it such a way that her images stick with you long after you’ve seen them.
Alfredo Jaar
I came face to face with Alfredo’s work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. In a temporary exhibit called “The Forgotten Exhibition and a Reading to Four Chilean Artists” the floor was lit up with fifteen green neon lights mounted diagonally on the ground. I was intrigued. Alfredo was born in 1956 and was 17 years old when Pinochet took over control of Chile in a coup. This influenced a lot of his future work since most of it revolves around a political or social theme. The piece that was side stepping around at the museum was called O Adeus . The lights were pointing towards five magazine covers with Raúl Alfonsín, the first democratically elected president after the last dictatorship in Argentina. The message overall is a since of hope for the rest of the countries in Latin America.
I love museums for the ability to make me look at life through a different lens. Taking time to follow up with a Google search on pieces that I really like only open my mind to the world more. As the French singer Albert Camus once said, “A true masterpiece does not tell everything”.
