The essay “Parpadeo y piedad,” which appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Cirugía plástica (Plastic Surgery), held in Berlin, discusses art in Chile, specifically, the art produced in the wake of the 1973 fascist coup d’état, which ushered in a period of oppression and censorship that impacted art circles and society as a whole. Speaking in general terms and without referring to any work in particular, Pablo Oyarzún discusses the art produced by the movement known as the Escena de Avanzada. He refrains from mentioning that one of the movement’s constant goals was to go against the authoritarian dictates of the de facto regime. That clearly avant-garde “scenario” forged by art and society was not only characterized by the resulting works’ abrupt, unconventional break with the past, but by pushing beyond the representational boundaries of traditional Chilean art.  

The exhibition Cirugía plástica / Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst [Plastic Surgery / A New Society for the Visual Arts] ran from September 14 to October 28, 1989, in Berlin. The exhibition included works that reflected the subjects and approaches addressed by contemporary Chilean art. The event therefore brought together, for the first time, works by more than twenty Chilean artists that showed the heterogeneity of the country’s art in terms of image, theme, and discourse. Several trends were on display there. Carlos Leppe, Gonzalo Díaz, Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Virginia Errázuriz, and Francisco Brugnoli represented the various ideas being explored by the Escena de Avanzada. The exhibition also included works by young artists such as Bruna Truffa, Rodrigo Cabezas, Ciro Beltrán, and Mario Soro, among others. The critics and theorists Francisco Brugnoli, Justo Pastor Mellado, Gonzalo Muñoz, Pablo Oyarzún, and Nelly Richard contributed essays to the exhibition catalogue.

Pablo Oyarzún, who wrote the essay “Parpadeo y piedad,” studied philosophy (which influences his writing) at the Universität Johann Wolfgang von Goethe de Frankfurt. He is an essayist, translator, and critic. Among many other intellectual accomplishments, he has published over 400 texts (including books, book chapters, essays, and articles) on a variety of subjects—epistemology, philosophy of language, aesthetics, musical theory and criticism, literature, culture, education, and politics—usually written from a philosophical perspective. Oyarzún has published a number of translations, including works by Pseudo-Longino, Emmanuel Kant, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin, to mention just a few.