The exhibition Cuatro artistas chilenos en el CAYC de Buenos Aires: Díaz, Dittborn, Jaar, Leppe was held at the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación) in Buenos Aires in 1985. The four participating artists were Gonzalo Díaz (b. 1947), Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943), Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), and Carlos Leppe (1952–2015). The exhibition was co-curated by the theorist and cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948) and Jorge Glusberg (1932–2012), the founder and director of the CAYC.
The exhibition catalogue was edited by Francisco Zegers. In addition to Pastor Mellado’s text, it also included an article on Jaar’s work by the essayist Adriana Valdés (b. 1943) and two by Richard, one about Leppe’s work and the other about Dittborn’s work. [See the ICAA Digital Archive for the other texts published in the catalogue: “Alfredo Jaar: Para América Latina espacios de reflexión” (doc. no. 734782) by Adriana Valdés; and “Carlos Leppe: Nota sobre la obra de Leppe” (doc. no. 734807) and “Eugenio Dittborn: Doblemente geográfico. A propósito de la pintura postal” (doc. no. 734740), both by Richard].
In Chile during the 1970s and 1980s, artists and theorists worked together in an unprecedented way, creating written critical works that paralleled the art scene of the period. Justo Pastor Mellado (b. 1949), for example, began to write about the work of Gonzalo Díaz in the early 1980s, and between them they published a number of works, including Cuestión de etiqueta, about the artist’s submission to the 5th Bienalle of Sydney (December 1983) in which Dittborn and Richard also participated; Texto auxiliar accompanying a painting presented at the Visuala gallery (February 1985); El “bloc mágico” de Gonzalo Díaz (June 1985) on the occasion of the Kilómetro 104 exhibition at the Galería Sur in Santiago; Omaha: cabeza de playa (July 1985) and Trabajos de mesa (August 1985), neither of which was published; and Meter la pata (December 1986) in reference to the Chile Vive exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1987). Protocolos Acuerdos de Mayo (1984) was another joint project in which the relationship between image and text blurs the boundaries between the authors.
Kilómetro 104 is the title of an exhibition of 6 homonymous screenprints by Díaz; these works were not well-known until 2020, when they were exhibited at La exposición olvidada y una lectura a Cuatro artistas chilenos. CAYC Chile/Argentina at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile. Justo Pastor Mellado considered the series to be of great importance, calling it one of the best examples of the contributions Díaz made to Chilean art, especially in terms of the debate about painting’s place in contemporary production. Those contributions were: “(1) Vicious conversion of its scale of iconicity, (2) visual hypertrophy of its objectual referents, and (3) textual transpositions as a condition of re/solution of color at zero level of de/composition.” Mellado claimed that Díaz’s work played a key role in the repositioning of painting, which was displaced by works and discourses that privileged conceptual development, thus challenging the pictorial tradition.
