Miguel Rojas Mix writes about Rodolfo Opazo’s painting, discussing the artist’s teratological world in which his imagination creates anthropomorphic beings. The author notes that Opazo’s painting combines dreams, an indirect way to approach reality, and sexuality, that ephemeral world with which man tries to grasp reality. According to Rojas Mix, the painter’s work lightens the sense of tragedy caused by the paradox that confronts the superficial nature of life with the tragic nature of being. He detects the influence of Enrique Zañartu and Roberto Matta and describes his work as being an expression of both abstract and figurative Surrealism, two different periods. Rojas Mix claims that Opazo’s work is marked by his own personal take on form and by a mystical-theological approach that suggests that art is an offering to God.     

The writer and academic Miguel Rojas Mix (b. 1934) published this essay about the painter Rodolfo Opazo (1935–2019) in the Annals of the Universidad de Chile (1965) when Opazo was thirty years old. The painter joined the university’s faculty in 1970 and taught there until 1993. He studied at the university’s Escuela de Bellas Artes in the 1950s and graduated with a degree in painting. He later joined the Taller 99 print shop, which was directed by Nemesio Antúnez. After a trip to Italy, he started painting again, influenced particularly by Amadeo Modigliani (1884–1920). [See the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Taller 99”  (doc. no. 745065) by Antúnez.]

Though Opazo’s painting has been described as Surrealist due to the influence of Roberto Matta (1911–2002) and Enrique Zañartu (1921–2000)—a matter that Rojas Mix explores in depth—he denied any association with the movement in the 1980s because, in his view, it had ended when André Breton (1896–1966) died. He acknowledged, in an interview, that as a young man he had been attracted to the movement, but in time came to believe that his painting did not belong in that category. The all-encompassing term “figurative” was the label he preferred, and in fact came to be known as a “Frenchified painter.” While he never acknowledged influences or interests, he was always in search of a mystical humanism; he found his inspiration in the universal and transcendent subjects of his own subjectivity and the human condition.   

In Chilean art circles in the early 1960s he was a contemporary of artists such as Roser Bru, Ricardo Yrarrázaval, José Balmes, and Gracia Barrios, among others. In 2001 he was recognized with the National Visual Arts Prize, the Chilean government’s award for artists. In 2005 he painted a mural at the Metro de Santiago, transitioning from canvas and stretchers to walls with a digital reproduction of oil paint. [To read an interview with Opazo and other painters, see “La pintura, su candente realidad” (doc. no. 749631) by Milan Ivelic and Gaspar Galaz.]