Curatorial Text
“Me is another, ” wrote Arthur Rimbaud, and that otherness that is Lourdes Naveillán emerges in the work that is made in the fabric or paper at the stroke of paint, ocean shedding or dripping of stars, and appealing to various tools of worlds far from the one of the delicate making off of their creations. Color has always been the protagonist of her works, but the gesture follows closely, almost stepping on her heels, as well as the textures, which can be bulky or almost transparencies, and they give each other — stirring in the magical cauldron of the Master and Druid —, to that language of such eloquence as silences that the artist configures.
Abstraction and figuration merge into that same mass of meanings and signifiers, and it’s not random that her latest production is inspired by the mysteries of outer space, the cosmos that surrounds us, and which she invokes when she immerses into her workshop or when she goes into the forests, fields and mountains that have accompanied her decades in her wandering through life.
The artist has given herself fully to painting, literally occupying the trunk, arms, hands and legs, not only the head or instinct, to transfer matter and genius to its support. She works from the bone and flesh, with spirit and mind, in her full light factory, paraphrasing Rimbaud again, with his “Illuminations”; the same one that one day stated that “the poet should become a seer through the convulsion of the senses.”
Painting, precisely, creates accidents when it convulses, they connect the sacred with the profane to guide the stain and movement, gestating the alchemy that is reflected in the works of Lourdes Naveillán, in which the beings have been gradually left behind. Today, it’s on the margins of the firmament that the essence of her pictorial experience resides, radicalising the immersion in abstraction; however, they are not unlikely to sprout again from their workshop, soon, sooner rather than later, those indefinable beings or artifacts or sculptures, raw poetry, pure creation made of scraps of glass, clove, iron and wood.
In all these other things the artist’s soul is reflected, the strength of her convictions, the endless energy and the diaphanous clarity of a consequent creator in the face of what she has given birth, precisely, and that surprises and excites. Because each new world is another world that she creates and is born with her, viscerally united—another but one, indissoluble—and her universe is a constellation of unnamed planets.
María de Lourdes Naveillán Goycolea (Santiago, 1971), channeled her early creative concerns in the pluralistic formation of the
Contemporary Art institute, in Santiago, and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Later she was part of the legendary workshops of Eugenio Dittborn, Arturo Duclos, and Taller 99. She has participated, collectively or individually, in more than thirty exhibitions, in Chile, Argentina, the United States and France.
Marilú Ortiz de Rozas
Doctor in letters of the University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Member of the Chilean International Association of Arts critics, AICA