“Alberto Pérez” is the title of this article by Francisco Brugnoli (b. 1935), in which he writes about a key participant in the academic, didactic, and political history of art in Chile. This article, about the artist who was born in 1926, was written on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition Alberto Pérez Pintura-dibujos- grabados at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, 2003). Sixty works were presented at this exhibition, which was a posthumous tribute to the creator and professor who had died some years earlier (1999).
Alberto Pérez was an artist and an art historian; he originally studied literature at the Universidad de Chile while taking painting and drawing courses at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas. He earned a PhD in Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (graduating in 1957) and then took a position as an art history teacher at the Facultad de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Chile. In 1961 he started work on a series of paintings called El tiempo y el muro in which he took the unprecedented step of including non-pictorial materials and spreading oil paint in thick, visible layers on the canvas. He and Eduardo Martínez Bonati (b. 1930), Gracia Barrios (1927-2020), and José Balmes (1927-2016) started the Grupo Signo, producing works that challenged traditional Chilean painting. The turmoil of the 1960s influenced the group of artists and strengthened their political commitment, making them keenly attuned to events such as the United States’ invasion of Santo Domingo (1965), the Vietnam war (1955-75), and the radical consequences of changed perspectives as a result of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The group was not exactly a movement as such since each member developed their own ideas in their works, but they did show their work as a group and shared a political approach in which art had specific meaning. [For more information on the Grupo Signo see the following article, written by Pérez, in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Presencia del Signo” (doc. no. 751514)].
In the mid-1960s Alberto Pérez began work on Barricadas (1964-85), a series in which he took a new approach to the traditional framed painting, as explained by the art historian Gaspar Galaz. His “deconstruction” involved making the canvas—the support—disappear by hiding it behind old pieces of wood, fruit boxes, or boards, with gaps between them that allowed the viewer to glimpse images, sacking, and daubs of paint. The name of the series referred to an ever-present component—used to block access or cordon off areas—of the street demonstrations that were a defining feature of those turbulent years. Works of this kind can be construed as “un-paintings” when they are presented as an object hung on a wall, which is another allusion to the political situation in those days. Some of the images used in these works were, for example, a photograph of a child holding up its hand or of the dead body of Che Guevara.
Beyond his career as a teacher, which influenced generations of artists, Pérez’s work contributed an unprecedented formal innovation because of its political commitment. He was a prominent figure in the organization of cultural resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-90). In 1977, a few years after the coup d’état, he and other artists opened the Espacio Siglo XX, a space devoted to cultural activities where an eclectic assortment of artists working in different disciplines could get together at meetings and lectures.
