Guillermo Machuca wrote “Ora pro nobis” about the exhibition of works by Arturo Duclos by the same name. In his essay, Machuca discusses the iconography of the works and the imagination that inspires them, making a distinction between “its exhibitive and its cultural contributions, between the mechanical and the pictorial.” The paintings he discusses rely on signs that function as apparently rigid allegories, but their countless combinations defy prediction. Machuca assesses La lección de anatomía (The Anatomy Lesson, 1985), an earlier exhibition of works by Duclos based on a modus operandi that differed from the one we see underpinning La isla de los muertos (The Island of the Dead, 1989), which was devoted entirely to painting. Here the support takes on an expressive role and extra-pictorial elements are infused with paint. The author suggests a parallel between the exhibitions Ora pro nobis and La isla de los muertos because they both use iconography in similar ways, in which signs become spectacular.   

“Ora pro nobis” is the title of the essay by the theorist and art critic Guillermo Machuca (1962–2020), in which he reviews the homonymous exhibition of works by the artist Arturo Duclos (b. 1959) at the Galería EspacioArte (Santiago, 1991). The exhibition included sixty small paintings that were produced from May through August 1990, according to the catalogue published by Francisco Zegers (1953–2012). The catalogue—whose complex design was created by Zegers—was a gamble in both material and visual terms, since the pages could be unfolded to reveal a large sheet that presented a full view of the works and the text.  

Shortly after leaving the Escuela de Artes, Arturo Duclos became involved in the Chilean art scene at a time when experimentation and conceptualism were gaining ground. The cultural theorist Nelly Richard (b. 1948) had identified a group of neo-avant-garde artists which she referred to as the Escena de Avanzada. As from the 1980s “the repositioning of painting” became a major subject for discussion, focusing on the traditional practice that had been challenged in Chile in works by Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943), Carlos Altamirano (b. 1954), and Juan Domingo Dávila (b. 1946), among others. This return to painting tended to favor the artist’s expressiveness and inner world, while ignoring the complicated political reality the country was experiencing under the dictatorship. Duclos—who was a member of the generation of artists who chose painting—took part in exhibitions that demonstrated the prevailing tensions of the times, including BENMAYOR/DÍAZ/DITTBORN/DUCLOS/LEPPE (1983) and Fuera de serie (Outstanding, 1985), among others. Machuca claimed that, for certain artists, the 1985 exhibition heralded the end of the Escena de Avanzada. That same year, Duclos showed La lección de anatomía at the Bucci gallery, where he combined paintings with installation. As Machuca mentions, that exhibition marked an inflection point when the artist moved away from installation and focused (initially) on a more expressive kind of painting, followed by an ironic approach. In 1995, the author wrote “El ojo y la mano” (doc. no. 757085), an essay about the artist’s most recent production, and took a retrospective look at his body of work. [On the subject of the discussions prompted by “Fuera de serie,” see the ICAA Digital Archive: “Intertexto” (doc. no. 734686) by Nelly Richard and “Todo fuera de contexto: todo fuera de contexto es el efecto de una cita” (doc. no 734699) by Pablo Oyarzún. As regards the return to painting mentioned above, see these two essays by Richard: “Retroactivaciones de un proceso” (doc. no. 730159) and “Return to the pleasurable” (doc. no. 743686).]