Historia sentimental de la pintura chilena is an extremely important work by the painter and installation artist Gonzalo Díaz. It features the girl who appears on Klenzo cleaning product packets, an image that is essentially a Pop Art icon and is immediately recognizable to all Chileans. Díaz’s work takes an analytical view of Chilean culture and history and is critical of art’s representational approach. Another example of this can be seen in his work Pintura por encargo (Commissioned Painting) [see the ICAA Digital Archive (doc. no. 744852)].
Support was forthcoming in Santiago from the Sur and Época galleries, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which allowed the multifaceted artist Gonzalo Díaz (b. 1947) to take a position midway between painting and Conceptual art and become a key figure in the new critical approach to painting that emerged in Chile in the 1980s. During this period he produced works such as Los hijos de la dicha (The Children of Happiness, 1979) and Historia sentimental de la pintura chilena (A Sentimental History of Chilean Painting, 1982), in which he questioned and, mainly, parodied the country’s received pictorial legacy. He later moved on to work on installations, addressing historical and cultural themes and different forms of representation and inclusion in exhibition spaces.
This text appeared in La Separata, the magazine whose first four issues (1981–82) were overseen by the art critic, cultural theorist, and essayist Nelly Richard. The magazine published texts written by noted authors and artists in the Chilean avant-garde art scene and the Escena de Avanzada, including Carlos Leppe, Eugenio Dittborn, Fernando Balcells, Adriana Valdés, Patricio Marchant, Enrique Lihn, Victor Hugo Codocedo, and many others. The magazine contributed to the exposure of and discussions about art in the 1980s, with critical editorial content that addressed the dictatorship the country lived under for two decades.
