Palacio Consistorial, Municipalidad de Santiago, Chile, 2018

Forms of Encounter

The Municipal Palace of Santiago is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculpture by the contemporary Chilean artist Ignacio Valdes, marking the 477th year of its foundation. Neither entirely figurative nor abstract, Valdes’ clay sculptures, which seem almost to have sprung from the earth, demonstrate a marked refusal to objectify the human figure beyond a loose anthropomorphic vagueness. They are blurred, smeared and smudged, and are comprised of different textures – some smooth and fleshy, others rough and cracked – and colours, ranging from warm terra cotta to pale pink, as if to suggest the infinite variety of the human condition. "What modern man wants," wrote the French symbolist poet Paul Valéry, "is the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." Valdes demonstrates a similar preoccupation. He works from within, articulating not the delights of seeing man – though there is certainly delight to be had in his deft handling of form – but the excitement of being him. His sculptures are energetic, dynamic and were conceived, according to the artist, in response to the communal notion of “the multitude as individual.” The figures may thus be interpreted as reflecting the rich diversity and breadth of people that go to work every day in the municipal palace. Art historical allusions abound: the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace, Michelangelo’s half-formed prisoners, encased in marble, Matisse’s frolicking dancers and foetal musicians of 1909 and 1910 respectively, Duchamp’s Nu aux bas noirs, Boccioni’s Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, Moore’s reclining figures and Bacon’s attenuated and manipulated models, de-formed and dis-figured, all seem to reverberate through this body of work. Each of these references constitutes an aspect, a quotient, of the morning throng, from clerk to chief executive, who together rush and swell through the doors of the palace each day: a tumultuous human sea, 477 years in the making.

- John Utterson