artnexus #49

Jorge Tacla (Chile, 1958) was since the 1980s among those young Chilean artists who returned to an exploration of painting. Ever since those days the canvas has been a subjective space, host to diverse investigations and materials.

His iconography moves between figuration and abstraction, creating disquieting images in which fragmented bodies are placed within imposing spaces. These paintings invite viewers to discover the signs represented, as if in a puzzle.

Present in the gaze he extends towards a changing reality, towards repeated and rewritten stories, are feelings of instability, of cataclysm. His paintings also tell of how the urban space is created and destroyed, leaving permanent traces. Those historical evocations bring us face to face with a past that has ceased to be viable but can still be felt.

Color and matter are also central to his panting. Color, in his ability to explore the possibilities of the monochrome and of saturated surfaces. And in the use of materials, as Zamudio has put it, Tacla finds “an additional narrative element that he deploys as signifier and signified.”

IVONNE PINI