Josefina de la Maza writes about the exhibition "Correlatos de ensueño" by Chilean artist Patricia Israel (1939-2011), which acknowledges the issues she addressed throughout her career, always influenced by politics.
The exhibition Correlatos de ensueño on the artist Patricia Israel (1939-2011), curated by Jocelyne Contreras Cerda, Sebastian Vidal Valenzuela and Alberto Madrid Letelier at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is a gateway to the work of an artist who, in the local context, has a mythical aura. Recognized and celebrated by her peers, she has not, however, had the exposure she deserves. Since her death in 2011, her work has circulated in a fragmented and reduced manner, making critical renewal of her graphic and pictorial work difficult. It is significant that this exhibition is taking place at the MAC's Parque Forestal, a university museum founded under the auspices of the University of Chile, and whose mission is to link together research, teaching and exhibition. The university's Faculty of Arts is a historically relevant space in the articulation between art, theory and history in the second half of the 20th century in Chile. Israel returns to her place of training and, at the same time, to a space recognized for promoting critical thinking.
This exhibition is part of a series of curatorial and research initiatives developed over the last two decades in academic and museum spaces that, although they do not respond to a common program, share the purpose of reviewing and renewing the narratives of the history of art in Chile. An exhibition on Israel's work is necessarily based on a careful look at the ways in which local art production from the second half of the 20th century has been written about and exhibited, especially when we consider the place painting has had in recent history. Since the mid-1970s, that is, in the context of the dictatorship, critical, anti-dictatorial and, therefore, anti-institutional discourses on Chilean art marked a general distance from painting—with some notable exceptions, such as the work of Juan Domingo Davila. This distance was maintained without any major questioning after the return of democracy and, until a few years ago, was mentioned as a distinctive feature of the local scene.
This distance has a place of origin: the Advanced Scene and, in particular, the writing of Nelly Richard.1 The emphasis on the displacement of supports and techniques, the break with tradition, the media relevance, the link between art and literature and the predominance of concept over doing, among other issues, were some of the elements that defined the art produced between the seventies and the two thousands, and meant the detriment of other types of productions such as painting. Associated with tradition, highlighting its strong roots in the craft and considered as a bourgeois and apolitical practice —especially if we consider the instrumentalization that the cultural apparatus of the dictatorship made of it—, painting remained, within the discourses of the neo-avant-garde, in a marginal space linked to an expressiveness far removed from conceptual reflexivity. Patricia Israel's work, however, does not fit into or respond to past judgments drawn from the Advanced Scene.
It is not only strongly rooted in the expressive conditions of language, but is also, in a significant way, anchored in history and, in a particular way, in politics. Patricia Israel's work is, we could say, a sustained reflection on the human condition and the traumas of memory. Likewise, and although her work takes painting as its starting point, this medium is continually overflowed and questioned by the themes worked on by the artist. Form and content respond, in her work, to the same problems and questions. The exhibition is organized around thematic nuclei and its curatorial key is the notion of correlates. The exhibition design is simple and neat and includes a strong yellow as a visual guide, which organizes these nuclei through color planes that accentuate the museographic organization and highlight the presence of some works. As the curators comment, the exhibition is a visual anthology that allows us to “understand the various issues that Patricia addressed in her career: the political, the emotional, the ecological, the feminist, history, language…” (MAC dissemination material). These stories are articulated as dense sets of visual references, constellations, as Walter Benjamin would say, which allow access to those recurring themes that define Israel's obsessions.
Perhaps one of the themes that stands out the most, and that clearly becomes an articulating element within the exhibition, is the different manifestations of the political and how these manifestations sneak in, sometimes obliquely and sometimes in a direct and brutal manner, into her biography. A defining series in this regard is De lo privado [On privateness] (2004), in which Israel superimposes various images on raw canvases that intersect episodes and memories of her private and public life. For example, she includes drawings by her granddaughter along with laboratory images of her brain, linking the present time with the beginning of her exile when crossing the Andes mountain range, after the military burned a paradigmatic graphic piece of the time, produced in conjunction with the artist Alberto Perez. The same can be observed in the series of El deseo de Antigona [Antigone's desire] (2001), which refers, through Greek tragedy, to contemporary tragedies. Antigone's desire to bury her brother echoes in post-dictatorship Chile, where relatives of missing detainees continue to search for their dead to bury them. In these works, the raw canvas, which Israel leaves exposed, contrasts with simple but large-scale elements that, with proper drawing and painting, fill up the space of the representation.
Series such as those just mentioned are complemented by others that, from another point of view, are also significant for curatorship and art history at both the local and regional level. The first of them, Charadas [Charades] (1982), is a set of drawings presented at the Epoca Gallery in 1982, two years following her return to Chile after exile. In this series, Israel combines images and words in a playful but also cryptic way, literally proposing a game of charades whose meanings remain hidden. After its exhibition in the early 1980s, the series was never exhibited again. Forty years later, this exhibition is once again on display in Correlatos de ensueño, putting into circulation and updating the corpus of works available for the study and exhibition of Chilean and Latin American art. Another relevant set of works is the one contained under the title Amor - Erotismo - Ecologia - Violencia politica [Love – Eroticism – Ecology – Political Violence], developed over a broad time span, between 1976 and 2008. Particularly noteworthy are the earliest works in this series, exhibited in Caracas during her exile in Venezuela.
Marta Traba wrote, regarding these works, that Israel joined “the intelligent group of critical draftsmen who will help us, like few others, to redefine Latin America according to its reality and its true nature” (quote from a text by MAC museography). The mention of Traba is interesting because it invites us to think from another perspective about exiles, forced migrations and the circulation of works and artists. It forces us to relativize the thesis of Chilean insularity and allows us to draw connections other than the genealogies that are usually projected to think, exhibit and write about Chilean art. In this sense, this exhibition sheds light on an issue that, until now, has not been explored in depth and that has to do with thinking from another perspective about the Latin American networks of this period, especially the artistic networks of the Pacific coast. From a transcordilleran logic, this exploration also occurs in another current MAC exhibition: Deisler - Vigo: redes graficas [Deisler – Vigo: graphic networks], which presents the collaborations between Guillermo Deisler (Chile) and Edgardo Antonio Vigo (Argentina), curated by Silvia Dolinko and Pamela Navarro. On the other hand, if we look at Israel's works, especially the older ones, we can perceive a certain "family resemblance" associated with the practice of drawing. It is a type of drawing and approach to graphics in line with works from the same period by Chileans Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Diaz, Eduardo Garreaud, among others. Viewing Israel's early works alongside those of these artists allows us to relativize certain hegemonic narratives, demasculinize the practice of drawing and painting (beyond the robust presence of artists such as Gracia Barros and Roser Bru) and leads us to imagine other histories of art, where the sensual, eroticism and politics are articulated in a different way: analytically, without losing the enjoyment of the material. In fact, looking closely at Israel's works, one can perceive the fluidity with which she moves between different registers of images; a fluidity that comes from her practice in engraving and graphics and that also involves collage. When she is the one who draws the image, she tends to express herself through various distortions; her handling of pictorial material is sensitive and stresses the themes she works on.
[1] The Advanced Scene, a term coined by art and culture critic and theorist Nelly Richard, brought together a series of artists who produced, from 1976 and throughout the 1980s, highly politically and conceptually effective works against the Pinochet dictatorship.
The exhibition Correlatos de ensueño on the artist Patricia Israel (1939-2011), curated by Jocelyne Contreras Cerda, Sebastian Vidal Valenzuela and Alberto Madrid Letelier at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is a gateway to the work of an artist who, in the local context, has a mythical aura. Recognized and celebrated by her peers, she has not, however, had the exposure she deserves. Since her death in 2011, her work has circulated in a fragmented and reduced manner, making critical renewal of her graphic and pictorial work difficult. It is significant that this exhibition is taking place at the MAC's Parque Forestal, a university museum founded under the auspices of the University of Chile, and whose mission is to link together research, teaching and exhibition. The university's Faculty of Arts is a historically relevant space in the articulation between art, theory and history in the second half of the 20th century in Chile. Israel returns to her place of training and, at the same time, to a space recognized for promoting critical thinking.
This exhibition is part of a series of curatorial and research initiatives developed over the last two decades in academic and museum spaces that, although they do not respond to a common program, share the purpose of reviewing and renewing the narratives of the history of art in Chile. An exhibition on Israel's work is necessarily based on a careful look at the ways in which local art production from the second half of the 20th century has been written about and exhibited, especially when we consider the place painting has had in recent history. Since the mid-1970s, that is, in the context of the dictatorship, critical, anti-dictatorial and, therefore, anti-institutional discourses on Chilean art marked a general distance from painting—with some notable exceptions, such as the work of Juan Domingo Davila. This distance was maintained without any major questioning after the return of democracy and, until a few years ago, was mentioned as a distinctive feature of the local scene.
This distance has a place of origin: the Advanced Scene and, in particular, the writing of Nelly Richard.1 The emphasis on the displacement of supports and techniques, the break with tradition, the media relevance, the link between art and literature and the predominance of concept over doing, among other issues, were some of the elements that defined the art produced between the seventies and the two thousands, and meant the detriment of other types of productions such as painting. Associated with tradition, highlighting its strong roots in the craft and considered as a bourgeois and apolitical practice —especially if we consider the instrumentalization that the cultural apparatus of the dictatorship made of it—, painting remained, within the discourses of the neo-avant-garde, in a marginal space linked to an expressiveness far removed from conceptual reflexivity. Patricia Israel's work, however, does not fit into or respond to past judgments drawn from the Advanced Scene.
It is not only strongly rooted in the expressive conditions of language, but is also, in a significant way, anchored in history and, in a particular way, in politics. Patricia Israel's work is, we could say, a sustained reflection on the human condition and the traumas of memory. Likewise, and although her work takes painting as its starting point, this medium is continually overflowed and questioned by the themes worked on by the artist. Form and content respond, in her work, to the same problems and questions. The exhibition is organized around thematic nuclei and its curatorial key is the notion of correlates. The exhibition design is simple and neat and includes a strong yellow as a visual guide, which organizes these nuclei through color planes that accentuate the museographic organization and highlight the presence of some works. As the curators comment, the exhibition is a visual anthology that allows us to “understand the various issues that Patricia addressed in her career: the political, the emotional, the ecological, the feminist, history, language…” (MAC dissemination material). These stories are articulated as dense sets of visual references, constellations, as Walter Benjamin would say, which allow access to those recurring themes that define Israel's obsessions.
Perhaps one of the themes that stands out the most, and that clearly becomes an articulating element within the exhibition, is the different manifestations of the political and how these manifestations sneak in, sometimes obliquely and sometimes in a direct and brutal manner, into her biography. A defining series in this regard is De lo privado [On privateness] (2004), in which Israel superimposes various images on raw canvases that intersect episodes and memories of her private and public life. For example, she includes drawings by her granddaughter along with laboratory images of her brain, linking the present time with the beginning of her exile when crossing the Andes mountain range, after the military burned a paradigmatic graphic piece of the time, produced in conjunction with the artist Alberto Perez. The same can be observed in the series of El deseo de Antigona [Antigone's desire] (2001), which refers, through Greek tragedy, to contemporary tragedies. Antigone's desire to bury her brother echoes in post-dictatorship Chile, where relatives of missing detainees continue to search for their dead to bury them. In these works, the raw canvas, which Israel leaves exposed, contrasts with simple but large-scale elements that, with proper drawing and painting, fill up the space of the representation.
Series such as those just mentioned are complemented by others that, from another point of view, are also significant for curatorship and art history at both the local and regional level. The first of them, Charadas [Charades] (1982), is a set of drawings presented at the Epoca Gallery in 1982, two years following her return to Chile after exile. In this series, Israel combines images and words in a playful but also cryptic way, literally proposing a game of charades whose meanings remain hidden. After its exhibition in the early 1980s, the series was never exhibited again. Forty years later, this exhibition is once again on display in Correlatos de ensueño, putting into circulation and updating the corpus of works available for the study and exhibition of Chilean and Latin American art. Another relevant set of works is the one contained under the title Amor - Erotismo - Ecologia - Violencia politica [Love – Eroticism – Ecology – Political Violence], developed over a broad time span, between 1976 and 2008. Particularly noteworthy are the earliest works in this series, exhibited in Caracas during her exile in Venezuela.
Marta Traba wrote, regarding these works, that Israel joined “the intelligent group of critical draftsmen who will help us, like few others, to redefine Latin America according to its reality and its true nature” (quote from a text by MAC museography). The mention of Traba is interesting because it invites us to think from another perspective about exiles, forced migrations and the circulation of works and artists. It forces us to relativize the thesis of Chilean insularity and allows us to draw connections other than the genealogies that are usually projected to think, exhibit and write about Chilean art. In this sense, this exhibition sheds light on an issue that, until now, has not been explored in depth and that has to do with thinking from another perspective about the Latin American networks of this period, especially the artistic networks of the Pacific coast. From a transcordilleran logic, this exploration also occurs in another current MAC exhibition: Deisler - Vigo: redes graficas [Deisler – Vigo: graphic networks], which presents the collaborations between Guillermo Deisler (Chile) and Edgardo Antonio Vigo (Argentina), curated by Silvia Dolinko and Pamela Navarro. On the other hand, if we look at Israel's works, especially the older ones, we can perceive a certain "family resemblance" associated with the practice of drawing. It is a type of drawing and approach to graphics in line with works from the same period by Chileans Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Diaz, Eduardo Garreaud, among others. Viewing Israel's early works alongside those of these artists allows us to relativize certain hegemonic narratives, demasculinize the practice of drawing and painting (beyond the robust presence of artists such as Gracia Barros and Roser Bru) and leads us to imagine other histories of art, where the sensual, eroticism and politics are articulated in a different way: analytically, without losing the enjoyment of the material. In fact, looking closely at Israel's works, one can perceive the fluidity with which she moves between different registers of images; a fluidity that comes from her practice in engraving and graphics and that also involves collage. When she is the one who draws the image, she tends to express herself through various distortions; her handling of pictorial material is sensitive and stresses the themes she works on.
[1] The Advanced Scene, a term coined by art and culture critic and theorist Nelly Richard, brought together a series of artists who produced, from 1976 and throughout the 1980s, highly politically and conceptually effective works against the Pinochet dictatorship.
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