Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this short text, the poet Pablo Neruda writes about Nemesio Antúnez, recalling when they met and the friendship they developed over time. He identifies the different stages of this painter-printmaker’s career by referring to the [...]

Federico Galende wrote this detailed review of Las cuatro operaciones del aparato reproductor, an intervention created by Mario Soro  in a public space. Galende reflects on the kind of cartography that can provide orientation for a work of [...]

Justo Pastor Mellado writes about Los nómadas del mar, the selection of photographs taken by Paz Errázuriz. The text is divided into four sections, beginning with comments on the artist’s work as a whole, which Pastor Mellado [...]

In this text the essayist Adriana Valdés discusses the work of Alicia Villarreal, who has created a game based on the alphabet that uses images of discarded objects as vowels to be read as a text. Based on the Walter Benjamin quote (the search [...]

In 2003 Justo Pastor Mellado wrote an essay for the catalogue for La quinta del sordo, the exhibition of works by Guillermo Núñez. On this occasion Mellado looks back to the retrospective Núñez presented in 1993, for which [...]

In this text Diamela Eltit writes about Guillermo Núñez’s artwork on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of his works. She discusses the political violence to which he was subjected during the military dictatorship (1973& [...]

In his essay “Realismo y crisis de la representación pictórica” (Realism and Crisis in Pictorial Representation), Guillermo Machuca addresses several critical points regarding the visual arts in Chile during the 1960s. They include, [...]

In his essay about the vast subject of art criticism in Chile from 1950 to 1973, Patricio Muñoz Zárate highlights the field’s defining moments, milestones, and notable personalities. In a series of subchapters, he sheds light on [...]

In his essay “Escultura chilena 1950–1973,” the critic Gaspar Galaz outlines the main criteria that influenced Chilean sculpture from 1950 to 1973. He also highlights watershed events and trends in art and identifies connections [...]

Justo Pastor Mellado wrote this introduction to El deseo de Antígona (The Desire of Antigone), the exhibition of works by Patricia Israel. In a review of earlier projects and exhibitions, the critic explains how the artist researches and [...]

Guillermo Machuca analyzes the work that Arturo Duclos produced in the 1980s (his first period) and then in the 1990s. The artist’s work, which is indifferent to the goals pursued by language (signs and meanings), forgets past references and [...]

The curator and critic Justo Pastor Mellado wrote this essay to be included in the catalogue for Se me nubla la cabeza. Te quiero y no puedo amarte más, the exhibition of paintings by Samy Benmayor at the Galería Sur (Santiago, 1984). [...]

In this text Francisco Brugnoli writes a first-person account of his first meeting with Alberto Pérez and records his opinions of him as an artist and an art history teacher. Brugnoli thinks back to when he originally met Pérez, who was [...]

Roberto Merino writes about the early career of Juan Pablo Langlois Vicuña, discussing the artist’s background in terms of both his embrace of art and his works. Following his professional training as an architect, Langlois Vicuña [...]

Justo Pastor Mellado discusses the Escena de Avanzada twenty years after Nelly Richard coined the term. Though it originally had militant undertones, the term evolved into a historical category. It applied to a set of texts and artworks that Richard [...]

In this essay, José Balmes discusses the work of Patricio de la O, reflecting on his painting and how it connects to the viewer. Balmes ponders De la O’s work, exploring his inspiration and his subject matter. The well-known Catalonian [...]

In this text written for an exhibition of works by Patricio de la O, the art critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado reviews the artist’s painting from his student days until his return to Chile after living in exile from 1974 to 1978 during [...]

In this article, Gaspar Galaz reviews the works by the Chilean painter Mario Carreño on display at the exhibition Retrospectiva 1945–1988. In the art historian’s opinion, the exhibition does not attempt to present “a grand [...]

In this essay, Guillermo Machuca discusses the evolution of Chilean art, from the founding of the Academia de Pintura to the artists of the 1960s, using the works in the collection held by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago) as a base. [...]

The essay “La puesta en escena internacional del arte latinoamericano: montaje, representaciones” [The International Staging of Latin American Art: Assembly, Presentations], by the French-Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard, is in the archives [...]

In “Destrucción, reconstrucción y desconstrucciones” (Destruction, Reconstruction, and Deconstructions), Nelly Richard critically reviews the cultural situation in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973–90). It was, in her [...]

In this article Milan Ivelic discusses conditions in Chile for the benefit of Spanish visitors to the exhibition Chile Vive that was held at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. One of the main things that stands out about Chile, as seen [...]

In this text, Raúl Zurita discusses the work that Francisco Smythe produced from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. He begins with Poema de amor (Love Poem), a work that helps him to understand Smythe’s ouevre, which he defines as a [...]

In this essay, Patricio Muñoz Zárate discusses his curatorial approach to the exhibition Subversiones/Imposturas organized for the IV Bienal de Arte. He describes a likely scene in which young artists try to change what is “ [...]

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 & [...]

In this fourteen-point manifesto, Eugenio Dittborn outlines his ideas about drawing. He identifies to whom the artist is indebted when he is drawing, referring to himself (“the author owes his drawings to…”) and explains what [...]

In response to the objections raised by Isabel Cruz to their book La pintura en Chile desde la Colonia hasta 1981 (Painting in Chile from the Colonial Period to 1981), the authors divide their arguments into four sections. Answering Cruz’s [...]

Nelly Richard discusses the work of the following Chilean photographers: Gonzalo Díaz, Eduardo Vilches, Alicia Villarreal, Enrique Zamudio, and Alfredo Jaar. Richard explains how each of these artists uses and contextualizes photography, and [...]

Adriana Valdés provides an in-depth review of Roser Bru’s body of work, arranged in three sections: “Materias” (Subjects), includes works produced since 1961, the year when she met Antoni Tàpies and started applying [...]

In this short text, members of C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) describe the group’s project, Residuos Americanos [American Residues]. They explain that the installation suggests a connection between “American clothes” ( [...]

This document includes three texts, each one written from a different perspective. The first is Lynda Kahn’s very short review of The Laughing Alligator, the video by Juan Downey, the Chilean artist who lived in New York. The second is a [...]

In this handwritten letter, José Balmes, the Catalonian artist who had lived in Chile since the end of the Spanish Civil War, recalls his arrival in the Andean country aboard the Winnipeg, the ship provided by the populist Chilean president [...]

Pablo Oyarzún wrote this short essay, Lectura de escena (Reading the Scene), about a book by Nelly Richard in which he identifies four main themes: (1) support for the artistic, poetic, and discursive practices that the Escena de Avanzada [...]

This essay, “Historias de recolección: bricolage, archivo y biblioteca” [Collection Stories: Bricolage, Archive, and Library], was written by Alberto Madrid on the occasion of the exhibition Chile 100 años de artes visuales [ [...]

The curator and researcher Alberto Madrid analyzes Historias de identificación (Histories of Identification), housed in one of the rooms at the grand exhibition held at the MNBA in Santiago, Chile, which uses portraits to record presence and [...]

José de Nordenflycht discusses Justo Pastor Mellado’s curatorial vision for Chile 100 Años Artes Visuales. He mentions the area that included five painters who all studied at the Universidad de Chile: José Balmes, Samy [...]

As part of his curatorial plan for the exhibition 1973–2000: Transferencia y densidad (1973–2000: Transfer and Density), Justo Pastor Mellado proposes that museums should reinstate works that, though ignored by the critical discourse of [...]

In this poetic, thoughtful essay, Juan Downey discusses his ideas about decadence based on a description of conditions and feelings. Downey, the Chilean artist who lived in New York City, explains that, from a third-world perspective, the decline of [...]

In this essay Pablo Oyarzún explains that Chile lacks the critical space needed to accommodate a public and autonomous line of argument. He condemns the absence of an institution devoted to the production, circulation, and reception of [...]

"El día de Díaz" is a text written by Pablo Oyarzún on the subject of Biografía, a work by Gonzalo Díaz. Oyarzún provides a detailed description of the piece, a triptych in which each part [...]

In this article Pablo Oyarzún provides a critical review of the art produced over the course of three decades. He notes the lack of a tradition that could bear witness to and interpret art production in Chile. From the early twentieth century& [...]

In this text Nemesio Antúnez provides a brief description of Taller 99. He discusses the origin of the workshop and his association with Atelier 17 (founded in 1917) in Paris, where he completed his training as a printmaker, underscoring the [...]

This essay is by the artist Mario Soro, who was educated at the Escuela de Arte de la Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile where he studied under the printmaker Eduardo Vilches. Soro describes his teacher in terms of his experience as a [...]

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 [...]

Francisco Zegers wrote the introduction to Desacato (Disobedience), the book about Lotty Rosenfeld, which he edited. Zegers begins by explaining that Desacato is about Rosenfeld’s work, how it was produced, and the interpretations it suggests [...]

This is Lotty Rosenfeld’s written commentary on her video-performance Proposiciones para (entre) cruzar espacios límites [Proposals for Intertwining/crossing Borderlands], which refers to the two frontiers involved in her project. First [...]

This is Lotty Rosenfeld’s written commentary on her video Una herida Americana [An American Wound]. She refers to the three interventions she performed, two of which involved painting crosses on roads. The first of the latter two took place in [...]

“La crítica de avanzada y algunos de sus efectos: reflexión sobre un libro de Nelly Richard” (Criticism of the Escena de Avanzada and Some of its Effects: Reflections on a Book by Nelly Richard) was written by Adriana Vald& [...]

Nelly Richard discusses the use of the human body as a support for a work of art. She refers to two art actions beginning in 1975. One of them was El perchero by Carlos Leppe; in the other, Raúl Zurita burned his face, photographed it, and [...]

In this text Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld explain the role of video in their work. They started working with video in 1979, using it to record ephemeral actions, and describe it as a “memory.” They discuss ways in which this tool [...]