Beginnings
I was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956.
I started drawing before I could walk. My early drawings encompassed a wide range of subject matter, including wars, car accidents, jets dropping bombs on burning cities, births, surgeries, world maps, and various catalogs depicting people of different ethnicities dressed in their particular cultural attires.
At around seven years of age, I decided to become a painter but promised myself that I would never open an art book to avoid being influenced by the outside world. However, this idea didn’t last long because the well-known Italian artist, filmmaker, architect, and humanist Vittorio di Girolamo showed up at my parent’s house. After skimming through my drawings, he suggested I be sent to Rome to study animation. Yet, he had one condition; that I be educated first. This was because, after conversing with me for a while, he realized that I had never heard of Michelangelo or his great masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel, which greatly disappointed him. Of course, I didn’t want to miss out on such an opportunity to travel to Rome, so I opened a book and began to familiarize myself with past artists. It was here when I finally met Picasso, Cezanne, Goya, El Greco, Leonardo da Vinci, and all the other greats of the art world. It is also at this moment of my life that I committed my first sin. I went against my principles and broke my promise of never allowing myself to be influenced by others.
Before traveling, though, I had to pass a test. I was shown pictures of paintings from which I had to identify the artists who had painted them. I quickly passed the quiz and was finally on my way to Rome. It was one of the great experiences of my life. I fell so much in love with Italy that I wanted to stay there forever.
1965
I moved with my family to Cali, Colombia. At around age eleven, I started drawing a series of satirical cartoons centered around a character named Pancho. I also wrote a novel titled “Una Piedra También Engaña” (A Stone can also Fool You). I designed a cover for it and made it into a homemade book I later gave my grandmother as a gift. After five years of living in Colombia, we moved back to Chile.
1973
Chile entered an era of political turmoil. A military coup ousted the President. I left Chile for Boston to study painting.
1975
After finishing school, I started to paint with pastels using my fingers as a brush. I was deeply interested in Pre-Hispanic imagery and bringing to light the art of Latin America, which I thought was underestimated at the time. I also met Norman Leigh, the director of Gallery 355, who invited me to exhibit my pastels. Moreover, Norman taught me everything about framing pictures which became very handy because pastels need to be framed. This will be my first individual exhibition.
1978
Eventually, my fingers wore out. First, my fingerprints vanished, and then the skin of the tip of my fingers, and that’s when I decided to leave pastels behind and explore other mediums.
1979
I became increasingly interested in the structures that hold images together. I noticed the many variations of stained-glass patterns on many of the windows of buildings in Boston. I spent time walking the streets observing them, taking notes, and sketching, which I then applied to my paintings. In this series of images, the main figure was held together by geometrical grids drawn underneath the paint.
1980
During this period, I became fascinated with Picasso, especially his engravings. I embarked on a series of ink drawings. I was attracted to the visual effect of engravings and prints. I didn’t have the resources to make engravings, but I made some ink drawings that greatly resembled that look. It was a great find!
1983
I distanced myself from Picasso. I was now fascinated with the idea that flat surfaces could be transformed into volumes and depths through trompe l'oeil, or optic illusion.
1984
Having discovered a technique to depict wood, I now looked for ways to paint the essence of walls. For this, I started combining acrylics with my oils.
The result of these works led to me receiving a scholarship: the Barcelona Sister City Travel Grant, awarded by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities in Boston, allowing me to travel to Barcelona to paint for six months. This was interesting because Barcelona, a city in the old world, had lots of old walls for me to study and observe.
1984
On my return to Boston, I thought that the walls of cities could be seen as canvases in which the sun, rain, wind, and time left their marks. I saw the walls as artworks painted by nature. I also envisioned them as pages of a book, the graffiti being the writings of people with nowhere else to express themselves. I wasn’t looking at graffiti art per se – there was plenty of it at the time – but rather, the hurriedly written messages and doodles scrawled inconspicuously by the anonymous passerby. Here I embarked on a long series of works that I called Graffiti Paintings.
I walked the streets every day looking for graffiti. Each find was like a treasure to me. I visited the poorest and most miserable neighborhoods, took notes, and drew sketches of my interpretations of the scribbles I saw, which I later took to my studio to paint.
I sought to make the graffiti marks “float” on the surface of the canvas as if they were levitating. The idea was to highlight their importance, give them value, and draw the viewer's attention to the spontaneous scribble.
1985
After having developed my idea of graffiti to the fullest, I went through a change of mind. I started questioning the optical illusion aspect of painting. I was plagued with questions such as why must we deceive the eye? doesn’t this add an element of deception in art? I considered the possibility of a more direct way of approaching painting. I decided to eliminate the illusion of volume and depth and instead apply concrete ways of giving shape to my feelings. At this point in my life, I was going through a separation from my wife. I needed to express my anguish and frustration. Wherever I looked, I saw wounds! I picked up a palette knife and slit the canvas right through the middle, an action that set off a series of paintings that I would later call my Black Paintings.
1986
One day, while I was sitting and analyzing my work, my attention wandered to a scrap wood pile in the studio's corner. Over the years, I accumulated many strips of thin lattice wood, which I used for framing my paintings. With a bolt of inspiration, I laid a bunch of them on the floor, arranging them in different ways to create a figure. When the night came, I contemplated the figure I had just made and liked it. It looked so ephemeral, just pieces of wood scattered on the floor. But I needed to pick them up if I was to paint the next morning because they were in the way. So I glued the pieces together to save the image. After I lifted it, I realized that the assembled wood drawing had become a sculpture and looked good. This led me to my next body of work which I called Constructions.
1988
By this time, my wife and I had been living apart. I lived on the east coast while she lived on the west. It was an amicable separation; we took turns being with and caring for our kids. They lived with their mother and would travel every summer to spend time with me. The other times I would travel to be with them at their mother’s home while she was away. One summer, while I was at my wife's house with them, I inspected the garage to see if I could use it as a studio while I was there. It was empty except for a shoebox containing a stick and a spool of string. I took out the stick and tied one end of the line to it; then, looking up, I noticed a fish eye screwed to the center of the ceiling above. I took hold of the opposite end of the string, passed it through the fish eye, and pulled it, making the stick go up in the air. The stick dangled and swayed. I then cut the box into pieces and created a man out of them, which I attached to the stick. When I manipulated the string, the cardboard man did pirouettes and danced. It was so amusing that I ran upstairs to call the kids. The kids were so captivated by the dancing cardboard man that they ran off to call their friends. Not long after, there was an audience of children watching the performance. This became a special day; a couple of years later, I would remember it as the time and place where the seed of the Marionette invention was born.
1990
I was awarded the Artist Fellowship Program grant by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities in Boston, which allowed me to start working on a project I had been thinking about for some time. I had been noticing many homeless people on the streets of Boston and wondered who those individuals were and what circumstances might have caused them to end up in such an extreme situation. I decided to talk with them and ask them directly. With a tape recorder in hand, I spent months walking the streets, striking up conversations with the homeless. I started by asking them, “what do you think of life?”.
After compiling many hours of recordings, I took the voices from the taped interviews and placed them on eight tape loops inside the construction of a wall that I had built. I named it “Talking Walls.”
As the viewers entered the exhibition space, they heard a faint murmur at first. Then, after getting closer to the wall, they distinguished voices from within, leading them to get even closer and listen to countless individuals telling their life stories.
1991
Xavier Adroer, the vice president of La Caixa de Barcelona, saw my work and believed in it. He started sending me a stipend of $1,000 a month for a year so that I could continue painting. This was of great help to me at a time when my paintings still needed to sell better. I will always be infinitely grateful to him. I now had the peace of mind to paint without worrying about money.
Memories came back from the time I spent with my children on the west coast of the United States. I felt the urge to take up the puppet idea that had originated in my ex-wife's garage. I dedicated myself completely to that.
I invented a new mechanism to manipulate puppets from afar and incorporated it into a play that I had written, “En el Baúl de Los Sueños” (Chest of Dreams). During the day, the marionette show acted as a sculpture exhibition, and during the night, it transformed into a performance. It took me a year to complete the project. The mechanism I invented did not exist anywhere before then.
“En el Baúl de Los Sueños” was about the conversations between a soldier and a doll. The soldier was a peaceful-spirited man who had been drafted by the military against his will and tossed into the middle of a bloody war. The doll was an innocent, optimistic little girl who saw only beauty around her. “En el Baúl de Los Sueños” was a disquisition that addressed the ravages and absurdity of war.
A small delegation came from Atlanta and offered me a job teaching puppetry at a university there, but I declined. I decided instead to go to Barcelona with my circus and tour all the neighboring towns. I packed the theatre into a crate and dispatched it via Swiss Air to Barcelona. The customs inspectors at the airport were fascinated and took photos of themselves posing with the puppets.
1991
The Iraqi war broke out. I learned the news from the TV while drinking in a Barcelona bar. The information troubled me profoundly. I didn’t wait long before I set myself up at a small, improvised table with watercolor paper and gouache and started painting. I painted frantically. I wanted to leave a testament to this. I painted a whole series in just over a day.
1992
I traveled to Costa Brava, Spain, to seek new light.
