This is the essayist Pablo Oyarzún’s review of Francisco Brugnoli’s installation Cadáver exquisito (Exquisite Corpse), a reference to the game played by early Surrealists in the 1920s, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (the exquisite corpse shall drink its wind). Brugnoli contextualized it according to the “logic of the remains” as a recurring signifier in the artist’s work that, in this case, refers to the absence of a work. In his reading of the installation the author engages in a dialogue with the texts in the exhibition catalogue and reflects on the work as seen from the perspective of a critique of the gallery where it was exhibited, an “institutionalized” space that Brugnoli attempts to acknowledge in his work.

This text appeared in the book El rabo del ojo. Ejercicios y conatos de crítica (The Corner of the Eye: Critical Exercises and Attempts), a collection of Pablo Oyarzún’s studies and essays about art in which he takes an oblique look at the object. The author was one of the critics involved in the so-called new art criticism movement that emerged in Chile in the wake of the 1973 coup d’état and remained active until the late 1980s. The group included Nelly Richard, Ronald Kay, Adriana Valdés, María Eugenia Brito, and Justo Pastor Mellado. Their ideas were discussed in catalogues, debates, magazines, seminars, and publications produced by the alternative exhibition spaces that were operating at the time, galleries such as Sur, Época, Cromo, and CAL. The members of the group all came up with unprecedented approaches to writing and criticism, constantly borrowing from semiology, psychoanalysis, and French poststructuralism, while setting themselves apart from government press critics and creating, for the first time in Chile, a profound awareness of the field of art criticism.

This collection of texts reflects the desire to reprint recent works of Chilean art criticism, a trend that arose during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an effort to gain acknowledgement and legitimization.   

Francisco Brugnoli was one of the most important artists in the Chilean art field in the 1960s and 1970s. Critical of traditional painting formats, he introduced the concept of “installation.” His Cadáver Exquisito (Exquisite Corpse) was shown at the eponymous exhibition at the Galería Ojo de Buey (Santiago, Chile, January 1990). The review Un Cenotafio (A Cenotaph) was published the following year in the fourth issue of the magazine of the same name.