Books about artists always carry a dual intention: on the one hand, the wish to present a body of work; on the other, the drive use it as a platform for thought. A monographic volume is, then, a strategy of inscription that combines a push for visibility and the desire to contribute to the reading of contemporary art. Ciro Beltrán. Una biografía, by Dermis Pérez León, makes just that gambit, but in an unusual way. In its 185 pages, the book includes 110 plates -most at full-page- reproducing works, plus intermittent texts, notes extracted from the painter¿s journals, and analysis by the Cuban curator. León displays a deep knowledge of the Chilean artist¿s creative process, and her gaze explores his work thoroughly. We intuit a particular closeness. Those of us who know of their romantic relationship will surely coincide in reading here the intention of an homage, of approaching the work with analytical care, respect, and admiration. And we will also understand that the book is motivated by a certain urgency to establish a discourse, to analyze Beltrán¿s proposal as representative of key tensions in contemporary painting, from the local context to the global space, from the encounter between geometry and the expressionist blotch, or from the realm of the conceptual to the realm of the spiritual. Although Beltrán, born in 1965, has lived a good part of his career in Europe, he has never disconnected from his native country. Emigrated in 1995 to Germany, he has also lived in Madrid in recent years, but returns regularly to Chile with artistic and institutional projects. In 2005, he founded the Art School of the Universidad Austral de Valdivia, and in the same year a large-scale individual show at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes included some of his work abroad, such as the ¿habitable paintings¿ or pictorial interventions made with intervened rugs. Early in her research, León was surprised to find that "for these years of extensive and prolific production by Beltrán" there is only one brief text by Gaspar Galaz, from 1989. She explains this by the lack of a critical dialog in the Chilean cultural sphere in recent times, with the dominant discourse validating critical avant-gardism over the pictorial tradition. León situates Beltrán locally within such tensions and argues that post-conceptual experiences "are present in his way of thinking about painting." She says that at the base of Beltrán's work are the pictorial tradition of the Universidad de Chile Art School-where he studied- and the neo-expressionism that so influenced painters in 1980s Chile, but also the experiences of performance art and conceptual art from the 1960s and 70s, German art, and two high points of reference: Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys. Beltrán, however, is mostly recognized for his work as a painter. He is known for a repertoire of abstract forms that, with a blunt stroke, graph rudimentary architectures, organic shapes, or germinal landscapes on spaces of well-studied color and rich materiality. The diversity of the pictographic, objectual, and performative exercises undertaken by Beltrán with those found rugs has not been properly valued in Chile, and neither have his street interventions or a working process that has transcended the boundaries of the frame towards the urban space, moving from the hedonistic act towards social import. Although the central text in the book is Sobre la expansión de la pintura en Ciro Beltrán, we miss a deeper probing of that aspect, which connects him with his early activism in Santiago, when he worked as a street artist and joined the environmental movement. The general order of presentation of the works is an almost retroactive chronology that accounts for the demarcations, crossings, and obsessions in Beltrán¿s career. Yet, most of the images are of his acrylic-on-canvas works or of two-dimensional works that joined textures with elements like wax, sand, wood, straw, silicon, and collages. One ...