The exhibition Pequeña y hermosa conjetura (“Small and Beautiful Conjecture”) brings together more than 30 years of work by artist Gonzalo Díaz, winner of the 2003 National Visual Arts Award. Fotoperformance—exhibited for the first time in Chile since its debut at Cirugía Plástica (Berlin, 1989)—and Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte (United in Glory and Death, 1997) are joined by two more recent works by the artist: La novia muerta (The Dead Bride) and La República (The Republic), both from 2019.
In Gonzalo Díaz’s works, the fundamental questions of our recent history are posed in the face of a permanent dilemma: that of visually rethinking the image of a republic in absence and the drama of a fragmented collective life. Lonquén (1989), a permanent installation at Il Posto, sharply emphasizes these issues. First exhibited at the Ojo de Buey Gallery in 1989, this work was a way of symbolically processing what the artist called the “punctum pestilente” of the dictatorship: the kidnapping and murder of 15 peasants from Lonquén and the discovery of their remains in the furnaces of a lime mine, now converted into irrefutable evidence of the horror.
The five works we present in this exhibition invite us to think about everything in our history that continues to flicker, like the fragile neon lights that have never ceased to appear in Gonzalo Díaz’s works.
