In recovery - Chilean art - Report from Chile

Seven years after the extremity of the Pinochet regime, Chilean artists accompany to avoid politics. Most reveal instead either a conceptual bent or an expressionistic replication to local experiences.

Like patients recovering from a serious illness, countries liberated from repressive political combination of parts to form a wholes welcome attention--except for the kind of curiosity that probes still-sensitive areas. admitting it's been seven years since democracy replaced General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, and Chileans are assuming to talk about their country's rising economic status, they are reluctant to publicly discuss Pinochet's 16-year rule. Perhaps in part because he is still head of the nation's army and real much a political presence, questions about Pinochet are met with a hesitance that's not quite fear, a chagrin that's not exactly shame.

allowing I went to Chile curious about by what means recent dramatic political turns had affected artists and their work, direct answers were generally not on the record. Political content in the work of conceptual artists wait ons to be oblique or ambiguous. Explicatory catalogue essays and a certain number of of the artists' own statements are frequently filled with dense language reflective of linguistic-based critical theories that have surfaced everywhere in the last scarcely any decades. One gathers that local politics is safely subsum in abstraction, conceptualism and postmodern practices.

For this informal scan I visited the studios of artists chosen from a list supplied by means of Santiago Museo de Arte Contemporaneo curator Ernesto Munoz and assistant curator Jacqueline Mory Compagnon. Those artists provided further recommendations. I was looking for work through young and youngish artists just now emerging into international venue and still relatively unknown in the U I ground more artists meeting these criteria than could be included here; they work in a range of mediums and dictions from conceptual and technical installations to conventional painting. In general, the older artists appear to be buoyed by better times and greater freedom and are producing work reflective of general political/cultural forces. The work of the youngest artists, those who grew up during the dictatorship, is either neo-conceptualist, or neo-expressionist and directly affected by means of personal responses to local landscape, myth, poesy and individual experiences. In single interesting answer to questions of politics, a young artist said that the get back to democracy seemed to bring with it permission to make more personal, apolitical work.

common support for Chilean artists is mixed. There are no art periodicals, market interest in the avant-garde is minimal, and solitary sparse government funding is devot to the University of Chile's ever-struggling Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago. The adjoining Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, however, has a small collection of late 20th-century art and periodically high hills contemporary exhibitions. Most galleries in Santiago tender only tiny spaces for solo exhibitions, while keeping multiple artists' works, usually paintings, hanging upon dividers in the back scope or they show everyone all at one time salon style, like an art store. The U.S./European protoplast of gallery representation of specific artists is the exception, and flat though all the artists mentioned here have shown in single or several of the commercial, alternative and museum spaces mentioned below, ongoing affiliation is rare. Visitors to Chile wishing to view work through specific artists are advised to inquire about in every one's mouth venues at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, as I did, or simply ask at any of the individual galleries or alternative spaces.

That said, Santiago galleries that present the appearance closest to the typical Euro-American contemporary gallery mode of speech are the spacious Tomas Andreu Gallery, the Plastica Nueva Gallery, the Artespacio Gallery (which specializes in sculpture) and the elegant fresh A.M.S. Marlborough Gallery. All are located in a fashionable uptown section of Santiago with wide boulevards and walled upscale residences like southern California's. A.M.S. Marlborough make opened last November with an exhibition that featured four artists representing three continents where Marlborough branches are located: Larry Rivers, the Spaniard Manolo Valdes, the Colombian Fernando Botero and the Chilean Claudio Bravo.

Downtown, in the attractive little Plaza del Mulato Gil de Castro, near the Museum of Fine Arts, is a small installation space step quickly by a gallery called Arte Actual, which also has an uptown space where paintings are shown salon mode of expression The day I visited, an interesting-looking installation by the agency of Ismael Frigerio, featuring a small traditional Chilean fishing boat and video monitors, had just been dismantled. In that same plaza, another small space, Centro Chileno del Grabado, specializes in prints and etchings. The plaza will also become abode to a museum-to-be which has been acquiring contemporary art works for the last small in number years; a two-year construction shoot forward will begin in January 1997