This art magazine interview between Julia P. Herzberg and Francisca Sutil involves a conversation about the artist’s painting process in general and her recent series Mute (2009), in particular. Sutil explains that prior to initiating that series, her paintings (2008–09) displayed rich, saturated colors, and she wanted to start from scratch with a new series. By returning to the childhood exercise of palotes from preschool, in which her teacher made her make repeated strokes with a pencil on paper to train her hand, Sutil began making similar small marks that became the repeated tear-drop shapes that appear in the Mute series paintings. The mark-making is simultaneously rational and unintentional, revealing her inner energy flows. Herzberg observes that the works recall Chinese calligraphy and the artist agrees that they appear to her as a sort of written coded language.

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Francisca Sutil (b. 1952, Santiago) is a Chilean-born painter who was based in New York between 1977 and 1992, when she returned to Santiago, where she currently lives and works. She studied at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, won a fellowship from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (1972), and received an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (1981). In 2000, she was commissioned to do twelve paintings for the Capilla Cruz, a chapel in Santiago de Chile. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Artists Space and the Drawing Center, both in New York. In 2016, Sutil was awarded Best Exhibition of the Year for The Will of Silence by the Circle of Chilean Art Critics, and in 2017, she received the Marco Bontá Prize from the Academia Chilena de Bellas Artes. Her work is in the collections of Vassar College Art Gallery (Poughkeepsie, New York); Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery (University of Texas at Austin); El Museo del Barrio (New York); the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, (Santiago, Chile); and the Museo de Belles Artes (Caracas, Venezuela).

Arte al día Internacional, where this interview appeared, is a bilingual contemporary Latin American art magazine (originally founded in Argentina in 1980) currently based in Miami. This interview gives special insight into the working practice, ideas, and approaches to Sutil’s painting.