Context

I began to produce my current body of work, both paintings and graphics, in the middle of the pandemic and during the period of civil protests in Chile. Both were dramatic and disturbing events that left a trail of unpredictability and uncertainty in the lives of many. As an artist, I saw this as a period that represented a situation of need and restraint that gradually imposed itself and influenced the work that I created in my studio.

My decision to dispense with the use of a full colour palette and to work exclusively with black and white arose during this period. However, whilst working in monochrome seemed restrictive at first, it soon opened new and interesting possibilities. Indeed, it allowed me to investigate the role of colour in the construction and perception of the image using a more graphic and simple logic.

In this way, the drawings and paintings that I produced resulted from a reduction of the tonal parameters to a bare minimum thus opening up alternatives and allowing me to resist and defer the infinite possibilities that the traditional colour palette might offer. In this way, the dazzling and subjective effect that colour can have on the way the image is perceived is substituted by a calmer, freer and even quieter experience.

It is as if the marks in black, white and all shades of grey that combine in the works acquire an innate ability to democratize the surface of the canvas, exploiting the absence of colour to monopolize our gaze, inviting us to capture the whole image before it becomes engraved in our minds. It is through this back-and-forth process that the painting develops.