Alejandro Quiroga
Galería Animal. Santiago de Chile
The series “Fine Tuning VOL. V / La tierra que habla” is inevitably included in a tradition of local landscape and “blot” painting developed from the late 19th century to the present, when it has been assumed not without generating contempt and skepticism by “critical” painters such as Ignacio Gumucio (1971) and Natalia Babarovic (1966).
Through his acrylics on canvas or paper, Alejandro Quiroga (1967) reconsiders the subject matter and a light way of painting, playing with the notion of the on-site sketch to capture the Chilean landscape in images in which nature shows some degree of human intervention. They are woods, valleys, hills or fields interrupted by a road, a surveillance tower or a bunch of houses, rendered by means of blots, gestures, sweeping washes and discreet drippings, with a tendency towards monochromy in which pale blues, whites, greys and blacks reduce the landscape to lights and shadows. A process of synthesis also operates in the formal aspect. The referents tend to become arranged on three planes: sky, ground and line of the horizon, or in abstract geometric lines or forms. The landscape is out lined austerely under the pictorial trace that also refers to photography. The absence of the body recalls a mythical silence, the signs of the urban minimal alterations to order remain as an echo subjected to the passage of time, a post catastrophe damper Thus, the series also inevitably involves a reflection about the local landscape in the post-earthquake context, confronted with the media’s imaginary, which saturated us with views marked by calamity and disaster.
