In this article, Gaspar Galaz rates José Balmes as one of the most important painters in the Chilean art world. The writer notes the international influence Balmes brings to his local perspective and concentrates his attention on the paintings and drawings produced in 1989 for the exhibition En tierra (a 50 años del Winnipeg) at Galería Plástica Nueva in Santiago, Chile. In this group of Informalist paintings, Balmes achieves his goal of connecting his work to his surroundings with charcoal sketches of human figures and by applying objects and utensils directly onto the canvas, among other strategies. He also uses soil as both a plastic material and a vehicle for gesture and action. His use of brushes of different sizes reveals the gestural quality of his sweeping strokes and the soil can be seen as a symbolic expression of his dual nationality (Spanish and Chilean). Galaz also mentions the hand-charcoal duality, describing it as another performance strategy used by this Catalonian-born artist in these undeniably gestural works. The tangible presence of soil as it mingles with the paints on the canvas creates a sort of sweeping effect derived from the Informalist trend that Balmes adopted when he was a member of the Grupo Signo in the early 1960s.      

The article “Balmes: dos tierras” (Balmes: Two Lands) was written by the art historian Gaspar Galaz and published in the catalogue for En tierra (a 50 años del Winnipeg), the 1989 exhibition of drawings and paintings by the Catalonian-born artist at Galería Plástica Nueva in Santiago, Chile. The event was held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Winnipeg, a ship that, after the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War, brought a number of Spanish exiles to Chile in 1939, where they enjoyed the support of the populist government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938–41). The family of the young José Balmes (born 1927) was among those exiles. By the time of the celebration, the painter was sixty-two years old and one of the best-known artists in Chile.   

In his article Galaz pays particular attention to the painter’s use of soil as a material for its own sake and for its plastic qualities, and as part of his technique of spreading, erasing, brushing, and so on, all of which can be seen on his canvases. The soil was also used as a “symbolic figure” to represent the dual nationality of a Spaniard who lived in Chile and belonged to both lands. In an ironic twist, Balmes was exiled a second time during a fascist coup (1973–90) that forced him to take refuge in France.