“All those portrayed condense, in their pose, the expression

definitive of a destiny not only individual, but

collective, since it passes through History”¹Bru, Roser. 1977. Kafka and us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo. 12.

Nelly Richard

“His tie is my Gordian knot

His Falabella suit is my backdrop”²Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga.

Enrique Lihn

Ahumada 254

In the bowels of a former furniture store located on the mezzanine of Ahumada 254, Galería Cromo opened its doors. The year was 1977, and, as Carlos Altamirano recalls, amidst the construction work to transform the street into a pedestrian walkway, “we walked on makeshift sidewalks of planks while our ears were assaulted by the drills tearing up the pavement.”³Altamirano, Carlos. 2021. Unas fotografías . Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales. 87.. Directed by Nelly Richard, who had arrived in Chile just seven years earlier, the gallery inaugurated no fewer than six exhibitions over the course of almost a year, featuring works by Carlos Altamirano, Luz Donoso, Pedro Millar, Eduardo Vilches, Roser Bru, Benjamín Lira, Francisco Smythe, and Ricardo Yrarrázaval. This is how engraving, photography and painting come together in this room where contemplation ends up being striated by the incessant clamor of the works that, during that year, seek to turn one of the main arteries of the Chilean capital into a pedestrian walkway.

In the words of Nelly Richard, the purpose of Galería Cromo was none other than “to develop a circuit of dissemination, around works of art, that would support their understanding,” in order to “propose a coherent vision of national artistic expression, based on the recognition of works according to the transcendence of the phenomena they determine, to the breadth of the paths they integrate” ⁴Raveau, Nicolás. 2010. “Bibliographical entry Galería Cromo 1977.” Archive. Art prospectuses . Santiago de Chile: Center for Arts Documentation INDEX. 99.. Therefore, each of these exhibitions is accompanied by a carefully prepared catalog that not only “aims to define the meaning of the work, but also the way in which it should be read” ⁵Raveau, Nicolás. 2010. “Bibliographical entry Galería Cromo 1977.” Archive. Art prospectuses . Santiago, Chile: Center for Arts Documentation INDEX. 99.. Hence, according to Tomás Peters, in the Galería Cromo catalogs, the critical reflections on the exhibitions are articulated from a chain of thought constituted by “a pattern of collaboration between the intellectuals and artists involved in these themes”⁶Peters, Tomás. 2025. An Oblique Becoming. Nelly Richard’s Intellectual Itinerary . Metales Pesados ​​Editions. 45.. It is, according to Richard, a matter of offering the viewer a series of critical inputs capable of ensuring an “openness of their successive readings”⁷Raveau, Nicolás. 2010. “Bibliographical Record Galería Cromo 1977”. Archive. Art Prospectuses . Santiago, Chile: Center for Arts Documentation INDEX. 99. around each of the works exhibited there. That is, to outline, in broad strokes, what “the rules that govern its functioning” consist of and what, in turn, “the relationships it maintains with the context” are in order to “finally define the field of its interferences”⁸Raveau, Nicolás. 2010. “Bibliographical Record Galería Cromo 1977”. Archive. Art Prospectuses . Santiago de Chile: Center for Documentation of the Arts INDEX. 99..

Inspired, then, by the mission Nelly Richard pursued almost five decades ago as director of Galería Cromo, I am interested in revisiting, throughout this essay, the pictorial work of Ricardo Yrarrázaval. I am thinking, however, not so much of the works of his that were included in the 1977 exhibition Five Expressions of Figuration in Chile: Dávila, Lira, Yrarrázaval, Bru, Smythe at Galería Cromo (fig. 1)⁹ As Ricardo Yrarrázaval recalls, although Juan Dávila was going to be part of the exhibition, he ultimately did not manage to send his works, which is why his name ended up being crossed out of the catalog that had already been printed. , but, more broadly, of his pictorial production of the seventies and eighties which, I argue, demands to be considered in light of the series of exhibitions that Richard directed in that gallery. Thus, like the ripples of a stone falling into water, I am interested in examining the impact of Yrarrázaval’s time at Galería Cromo on his work, not so much to consider a before and after, but rather to take this milestone as the center of the pictorial universe the artist developed between 1973 and 1990: a kind of unforeseen mandala around which the multiple figures the painter tentatively explored amidst the gloom of the dictatorship become critically legible. In the following lines, therefore, I focus on the visual work Yrarrázaval undertook during those two decades—comprising primarily oil paintings and pastels—in dialogue with two of the catalogs Nelly Richard published under the gallery’s auspices: I am referring, specifically, to those of Roser Bru ( Kafka and Us , 1977) and Carlos Altamirano ( Santiago de Chile , 1977).

Fig. 1. Exhibition catalogue Five expressions of figuration in Chile: Dávila, Lira, Yrarrázaval, Bru, Smythe, Galería Cromo, 1977. Il Posto Archive.

What I ultimately seek through this essay is nothing other than to critically imagine the exhibitions and catalogues of these three exhibitions at Galería Cromo in terms of a sounding board and, also, in the manner of a prism . I am thinking, for now, of a space of reverberation in which, later, in light of the critical reflections that Nelly Richard and Adriana Valdés write about Roser Bru’s exhibition «Kafka and Us,» the artistic explorations around pictorial portraiture to which Yrarrázaval dedicates himself from 1973 onwards find an echo. Although, at the same time, it occurs to me that the gallery also functioned for the artist as a prism capable of redirecting his work –until then focused on the interior of homes and offices– towards the urban open air: as if, in light of Carlos Altamirano’s photographic wanderings, Yrarrázaval himself had been irresistibly seduced to look at those fleeting bodies that, in those years, ran at full speed through the city.

Incarcerated faces: (counter)faces for an urban portrait

Santiago, Chile. September 1973. Just days after the coup, numerous relatives of political prisoners, uncertain of their whereabouts, gathered near the National Stadium. Carrying passport photos or even old postcards stolen from family albums, they tried to gather any information that might lead them to their loved ones or, at the very least, some news of them. Initially used as an urgent search and later as a means of furious protest, it was through this citizen action—as Ángeles Donoso Macaya argues—that this practice “made visible [during the years of the dictatorship] the crime of enforced disappearance in the public sphere,” while also “enabling the creation of a counter-archive of the repression.” ¹⁰Donoso Macaya, Ángeles. 2021. The Insubordination of Photography . Santiago, Chile: Metales Pesados. 27..

A city populated by specters is what Ricardo Yrarrázaval painfully inhabits from then on, since, in the streets of the country, the crowds—who during the three years of the Popular Unity government proudly marched down the Alameda—are barely discernible in the blurred imitation of the photographs that their relatives brandish as a last and desperate recourse in the face of their uncertain disappearance. And I say blurred not only because, as Donoso Macaya recalls, the material precariousness of these images stolen from domestic intimacy becomes such that, since 1976, the Vicariate of Solidarity has had to enlarge and even reconstruct the faces of the disappeared on more than one occasion in order to file the reports among its cases.¹¹Donoso Macaya, Ángeles. 2021. The Insubordination of Photography . Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados. 27.; but also because these effigies are merely the indicative, accusatory trace of all those bodies that the military makes disappear, in full view and with the patience of the entire citizenry.

In light of this urban panorama, I would argue that the figurative impulse that runs through Yrarrázaval’s 1970s production is closely related to the countless photographic portraits that, after September 11th, proliferated throughout the country’s streets. Indeed, in that tireless pursuit of depicting human faces, the horrifying reverse side of a previously unimaginable national portrait seems to be outlined : a kind of ominous counterpoint where political violence takes shape not in the absent gaze of the disappeared, but in the distorted grimaces of those who, obliquely, orchestrated their abduction. For if, from a formal point of view, the pictorial genre chosen by Yrarrázaval finds an echo in the insubordination of the aforementioned photographic archive, the silhouettes that populate his work seem to openly parody it, insofar as they do not embody any victim, but, on the contrary, the perpetrators of their disappearance. As is, in fact, evidenced, with great irony, by Portrait of an Acquaintance (1978) (fig. 2), an oil on canvas whose title lexically reveals the parodic dialogue established by portraying, precisely, one of those privileged individuals who, after the Coup, delight in its disappearance.

Fig. 2. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Portrait of an acquaintance , 1978.

I am referring, in the artist’s own words, to those «suited figures» whom he associates «with the same old rulers,» given that «the military dictatorship marked the return of those packaged gentlemen» ¹²«Conversation with José Zalaquett.» Ricardo Yrarrázaval: 1952-2014 . Santiago, Chile: Foramen Acus. 28.. But why a return and not simply an arrival ? Because, between 1973 and 1990, Yrarrázaval experienced the Chilean civic-military dictatorship less as a radical sociopolitical shift than as a traumatic return to the familial conservatism that marked his childhood: that rigid domestic world governed by a father who worked at the Santiago Stock Exchange and who, as he himself recalls, forced him to wear a tie at Sunday lunch ¹³Personal interview with Ricardo Yrarrázaval. December 18, 2025.. Hence, in an interview with Verónica Waissbluth, the artist insists on warning that “the return of these gentlemen in ties” constitutes a true regression to “the world in which he was born”¹⁴Waissbluth, Verónica. 2012. Great Contemporary Chilean Artists. Ricardo Yrarrázaval . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cecilia Palma. 42..

Also of great interest are * With Credit on Their Lips* (fig. 3) and *In Collar and Tie* (fig. 4), two pastels from 1976. As in * Portrait of an Acquaintance* , the faces of those portrayed are blurred to the point that, in each case, one of their eyes disappears, rendering them unrecognizable behind an ambiguous, ghostly veil. For, in stark contrast to the colorful stripes of the ties and shirts that confine their bodies, the defiant gaze of these gentlemen—which, unflappable, seems to challenge its viewers—is diluted by the heat of that grotesque grimace that deforms them. It is like a kind of perverse sfumato in which the desired effect, however, is the complete opposite of that of Leonardo’s Renaissance painting, since the spectral contours that Yrarrázaval brings to life seem to infuse the portrayed businessmen with an air that distances them from reality. Their faces, then, form a silhouette that, I insist, becomes doubly blurred when contrasted with the voluminous garments their bodies display as the undeniable mark of class privilege, where the colors clash with the chromatic poverty of those funereal black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the city. For the great irony of the portraits this artist produced from 1973 onward lies in revisiting the quintessential bourgeois genre (I’m referring to the painted portrait), but reimagined through the diffused light of the photographic portrait, the kind that, a few days after the coup, carries a ghostly air throughout Chile, offering itself as the only visible trace of the political prisoners who, following the regime’s policy, are made to disappear.

Fig. 3. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, With Credit in the Mouth , 1976

Fig. 4. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, In a Collar and Tie , 1976

In Ricardo Yrarrázaval’s visual production, therefore, state terrorism takes shape not through its victims, but through its perpetrators. Or, rather, in the pristine effigy of that business class which, in the name of neoliberalism, is complicit in that policy of extermination which, between 1973 and 1990, claimed the lives of more than three thousand people throughout Chile. ¹⁵Website of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Before his astonished gaze, the impassive elite to which the artist belongs by kinship, serves in his 1970s portraits as a metonym for those dictatorial agents in charge of repressing, torturing, and annihilating. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to think of the portraits of these suited gentlemen as the flip side or the negative of that photographic archive of the disappeared. Meanwhile, the spectral silhouettes of those portrayed already announce, in their very spectral quality, the accumulation of those human remains that ultimately sustain and ensure their political and economic triumph. The deformity of their faces, then, reveals itself less as a loss of identity than as a material indication of that political violence which, despite being celebrated with indifference, the elite strives to sweep under the rug. Hence, these three businessmen appear depicted with only one eye, as if the wink through which they become one-eyed were nothing more than the materialization of their monstrous complicity. The same complicity that leads them to adorn their starched shirts with elegant ties: a textile symbol of a fortune that, from their gleaming offices, has been amassed at gunpoint across the entire country.

I would like to point out, in this regard, that the full political potential of the portraits that Ricardo Yrarrázaval painstakingly produced after the coup can be retrospectively examined in light of the reflections included in Kafka and Us  (1977), the catalogue for the second exhibition at Galería Cromo dedicated to the work of Roser Bru (fig. 5). I am referring, specifically, to the insightful essays by Adriana Valdés (“The Eyes of the Buried”) and Nelly Richard (“The Work of Memory in the Painting of Roser Bru; in its Practice and Representation”), in which the critics observe how, in the work that the Catalan artist exhibited at Cromo in early 1977, the genre of portraiture—both pictorial and photographic—allowed her to obliquely revisit the policies of human extermination orchestrated during the Holocaust (1941–1945). I mean that, read in light of these seminal reflections, the visual production that Yrarrázaval strives for during the first five years of the dictatorship reveals itself to be close to that of Bru in its imperious defiance to revisit History – with a capital H – from certain faces.

Fig. 5. Exhibition catalogue Kafka and Us , Cromo Gallery, 1977. Il Posto Archive.

In her essay on Bru’s painting (fig. 6), Nelly Richard highlights this «retrospective mode» through which the artist «collects situations and destinies, as witnesses or as victims of the events of History, of the events of their remembered stories» ¹⁶ Richard, Nelly. «The work of memory in the painting of Roser Bru; in its exercise and representation.» Kafka and Us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p.. In her case, however, it is the photographic portraits of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, his correspondent Milena Jesenská, and Anne Frank, the famous German Jewish diarist and victim of the Nazi regime, that are summoned to be transmuted by the magic of the brush. It is from her portraits that Richard observes how they all “condense, in their pose, the definitive expression of a destiny that is not only individual, but collective, since it passes through History”: a destiny whose “fatality […] is absorbed in their eyes, in the first direction of their photographed eyes, facing the camera, in the second direction of their now painted eyes, facing our eyes as spectators of Roser Bru’s painting”¹⁷Richard, Nelly. “The work of memory in the painting of Roser Bru; in its exercise and representation.” Kafka and Us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p.. Adriana Valdés also refers to this same gaze in “The Eyes of the Buried” (fig. 7), when she observes that the eyes of those portrayed—whose “gazes scattered through time” converge, at the same time, in “a time traversed by those gazes”—create the place of the spectator: that “uncomfortable place of someone who is observed—fixedly—by the dead”¹⁸Valdés, Adriana. “The Eyes of the Buried.” Kafka and Us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p..

Fig. 6. Essay by Nelly Richard published in the exhibition catalogue Kafka and Us , Cromo Gallery, 1977. Il Posto Archive.

Fig. 7. Essay by Adriana Valdés published in the exhibition catalogue Kafka and Us , Cromo Gallery, 1977. Il Posto Archive.

Thus, the macabre wink that disfigures the gentlemen painted by Yrarrázaval acquires a new depth. A grimace that, as I have indicated, endows them with a grotesque aura by ghosting faces whose edges the artist has set out to blur. Like Bru’s paintings, where, according to Adriana Valdés, “the faces that look resemble one another”¹⁹Valdés, Adriana. “The Eyes of the Buried.” Kafka and Us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p., the effigies of these businessmen merge into one another, uniting in a sinister family resemblance. But also, as Valdés notes regarding Bru, all these portrayed figures “are alike in death, they become progressively transparent before the death they carry within,” for “it is death that erases them: through them, it is death that looks” ²⁰Valdés, Adriana. “The Eyes of the Buried.” Kafka and Us . Santiago, Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p.. A doubly blurred death, insofar as these spectral subjects are, in Yrarrázaval’s work, the proud, visible counterpoint to all those corpses disappeared by the civic-military dictatorship. By standing proudly before the viewer, their disdain can be interpreted less as indifference than as boasting, since the immaculateness of their attire reveals the social privilege that ensures their economic and political status. These men in white shirts—who are posed in their birthday suits—know full well that their distorted profiles conceal an even greater distortion: that of a disfigured country in which missing citizens have no face other than that of the photographs that their families, driven by unfathomable despair, begin to collect.

Now, if their faces are the faces of death, the brush that portrays them is undoubtedly that of oblivion. But it is an oblivion that contrasts diametrically with the one Bru bestows upon her portraits of Franz, Milena, and Ana. For if, in the words of Nelly Richard, “the instruments of Roser Bru’s painting are at the function of de-painting,” through an operation characterized by “erasing the paint, leaving only traces of it,” a process in which “the brush, or the pencil, comes to manifest forms of decomposition of the image” ²¹Richard, Nelly. “The work of memory in the painting of Roser Bru; in its exercise and representation.” Kafka and Us . Santiago, Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p., in Yrarrázaval’s portraits, only the faces—a sign of identity—are blurred, not the shirt and tie—a sign of class—which, in fact, take on relief in their voluminous and clear materiality. As if to indicate that each of these gentlemen is nothing more than a sophisticated cog necessary in the articulation of the bloody repressive apparatus. Or perhaps to remind us that, within the Chilean jet set , family credentials—surname and first name—are inherited like a noble title, ensuring among them a first-class citizenship that Yrarrázaval seems to condemn. Or even to accuse them of monstrously diluting, in their stock market greed, the identities of these successful men in the counting of pesos and dollars, through financial transactions where the only thing that matters, in the end, is the profit. We recall that none of these characters has a name: not because torture, as in the case of the disappeared detainees, makes their identity recognition difficult, if not impossible, but because, terrified by the reality that surrounds him, the painter himself – who has also disfigured his own surname²²According to the artist himself, it was he who, when signing his work, decided to change the initial letter of his first surname, swapping the I for a Y: a gesture that not only allows him to take a symbolic distance from the paternal figure, but also from that patrician origin that the surname Irarrázaval holds in Chile. Recall, without going any further, that among the most important entailed estates founded in Chile during the Colony, that of Irarrázaval stood out for its wealth, being present even to this day in the national ruling elite (see “The Chilean aristocracy of the 18th century” on the Memoria Chilena website)– he categorically refuses to identify each of these gentlemen, who appear to him as the various facets of the same complicit pleiad.

A few years later, Yrarrázaval even revisited the titles of his 1977 pastels to name two new works: * With Credit on Their Mouth* (1978) (fig. 8) and * In Collar and Tie* (1979) (fig. 9), oil paintings on canvas in which he portrays, once again, two men in ties. The first is monstrously blurred, the second grotesquely distorted, but both are prisoners of their silky ties; these new subjects don’t even dare to meet the viewer’s gaze. Perhaps this indifference is nothing more than the display of a class pride bordering on shamelessness, as is also clearly seen in * Dead of Laughter* (1977) (fig. 10), an oil on canvas where the painter’s irony reaches an even greater paroxysm, insofar as the grimace has been replaced by a deathly laugh. A burst of laughter that, this time, is echoed by the work’s biting title, a daring pun through which the everyday metaphor (‘dying of laughter') once again points, quite literally, to the mocking insolence of the perpetrators. For by portraying the character’s Goyaesque laughter at the very moment it fades, the painting imagines the mockery under the guise of a modesty that, we know, it barely tries to conceal.

Fig. 8. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, With Credit in the Mouth , 1978

Fig. 9. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, In a Collar and Tie , 1979

Fig. 10. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Dead from Laughter , 1977

The deformities of these three faces, of course, underscore the thousands of tortures and murders that sustain their political supremacy. And, as in Bru’s portraits, in this case, «the strokes, traces, marks, and stains of the paint»—according to Nelly Richard—»are the stigmata of the flesh, punished once again.» ²³Richard, Nelly. «The Work of Memory in the Painting of Roser Bru; in its Exercise and Representation.» Kafka and Us . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo, 1977. n.p.. Bodily torment that, through a second-degree laugh, Yrarrázaval himself confronts with that entire elite that justifies it or at least feigns indifference, stamping on their faces the violence of that torture they refuse to acknowledge. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that, to distort his subjects' faces, the painter resorts not only to the various tools—such as squeegees and spatulas—available in his studio, but also to his own hand. Or at least that is what he confesses regarding Rejected Proposal (1980) (fig. 11), recalling: “I didn’t like how it was turning out, so I put my hand on it to distort the face. And although I finished it carefully afterward, it retained the distortion.” ²⁴Waissbluth, Verónica. 2012. Great Contemporary Chilean Artists. Ricardo Yrarrázaval . Santiago de Chile: Galería Cecilia Palma. 41.. Imprinted by his own hand, the distortion of the face conceals, from the viewer’s eyes, the violent secret of its origin, in a kind of displaced scene that diagrams, on an artistic scale, the impotence the artist himself feels in the face of reality. Born of exasperation, the scratch that distorts the subject’s identity serves, in this work, as the materialization of political frustration, or perhaps of a painful impotence in the face of what his terrified gaze sees. For even if in each portrait the horrific national reality seems to remain offstage, the truth is that, ominously, it takes shape in each of these faces rescued under the visible signs of deformation. Indeed, in their erasures and blurring, the identity of each model has been violently distorted, revealing itself as the artist’s oblique rejection of the torture and murders that, during those years, the dictatorship painstakingly sought to mask. Thus, the proposition rejected by Yrarrázaval is none other than that of a country politically disfigured in the heat of gunfire: a Chile whose image takes form in the violent deformations that crisscross his portraits, those that make this gallery of effigies a chilling collection.

Fig. 11. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Rejected Proposal , 1980

Faces in flight: the ghosts of the city

Six years after its resounding inauguration as a pedestrian avenue, Enrique Lihn published El paseo Ahumada (1983), in whose verses the poet – who recognizes himself as “a regular of the Paseo since the very day of its founding” ²⁵Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El Paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga. s/p. – crosses the streets of downtown Santiago to lose himself in the swarming bustle of the hurried passersby that swarm through the city. Contrary to what the managers of its remodeling might have imagined, what attracts the writer is not so much the glitter of the modern commercial premises as the beggary that crowds its outskirts, since, in his words, “the Paseo [is] nothing [but] the pavilion in which the breakdown of the economic model is exhibited” while “the shop windows raise prices to infinity and the importers of cheap trinkets at rock-bottom prices flood the ground of the promenade, doing their business”²⁶Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El Paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga. s/p.. It will suffice to recall, for now, that on the back cover of this booklet, whose design materially mimics the disposable newspapers that are hung daily in the kiosks of that street, the writer warns: “The Paseo Ahumada was going to be the runway for economic takeoff, a space for urban decongestion. It was about cultivating a pedestrian oasis in the middle of a city as prosperous as it is surveilled. Surveillance [that’s for sure] is the only thing the project remembers, [since] it is maintained with weapons and police dogs”²⁷Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El Paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga. n.p..

For Enrique Lihn, therefore, it is precisely “economic reasons that have transformed the Paseo, built with less interesting objectives, into the Grand Theater of national and popular cruelty, where all the trades of survival are practiced, from the most spectacular to the most secret, none of them escaping publicity”²⁸Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El Paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga. n.p.. Economic reasons, no doubt, but not the best. Hence the great irony that runs through and sustains these free verses—“(something that is!)”, Lihn notes—in which, “fascinated by the needy arrogance of the spectacle”²⁹Lihn, Enrique. 1983. El Paseo Ahumada . Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Minga. As Ahumada offers his wares to passersby, the poet’s gaze lingers on the gaunt silhouette of the Penguin, that young beggar who appears in Paz Errázuriz’s photograph that graces the book’s cover (fig. 12). His eyes lost in thought, the boy furiously taps out a rhythm on his tambourine, a rhythm capable of counteracting the hurried pace of the walkers and stirring their compassion, as evidenced by the modest sign placed at the foot of his makeshift podium, where, to the rhythm of «God bless you,» his «salary» is revealed, amassed through «contributions.»

Fig. 12. Cover of El Paseo Ahumada by Enrique Lihn, 1983. Photograph by Paz Errázuriz.

Fig. 13. Exhibition catalog Santiago de Chile , Cromo Gallery, 1977

Given this, Altamirano’s exhibition catalog reads like a set of user instructions, an unexpected urban manual inviting visitors to leave the mezzanine of Ahumada 254 and venture into the city’s heart. Through the pages of Santiago de Chile , the photographs of the Metro can be seen as an invitation to explore that space outside the art institution. Or even as a provocation to begin thinking about an art capable of connecting with the citizenry within the very heart of the besieged city (as CADA and, more broadly, the entire Escena de Avanzada would begin to do two years later, in 1979). An art capable of transcending the narrow limits of a cultural establishment that, during the seventeen years of the regime, was the victim of blatant military intervention. As the hasty raid suffered by the Museum of Fine Arts on September 11, 1973, and the subsequent resignation and departure from the country of its director, Nemesio Antúnez, remind us,³⁴In an interview broadcast by UCV TV in the late 1980s, donated by the artist’s widow to the Audiovisual Archive of the Documentation Center (CEDOC) of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile, Nemesio Antúnez recalls his arrival at the museum on September 11, remembering how, following an apparent telephone report that there were people hiding inside the building, army tanks arrived and began firing, damaging both the facade of the building and some of the works on display..

Now, in a letter dated November 13, 1983, Ricardo Yrarrázaval writes from Santiago to Antúnez to tell him not only about the enormous effort required at that time to complete his works, but also to emphasize how the “Chilean situation” “deeply affects” both him and his artistic work.³⁵Yrarrázaval, Ricardo. Letter to Nemesio Antúnez. November 13, 1983. Nemesio Antúnez Foundation Archive. When referring to the figures that populate his visual production of those years, the artist points out: “They are the people who try to create an artificial, distorted, false world. The people who, regardless of the means, seek power. Power means the bomb, war, pollution, hunger, hatred, the destruction of nature, the destruction of reality.”³⁶Yrarrázaval, Ricardo. Letter to Nemesio Antúnez. November 13, 1983. Nemesio Antúnez Foundation Archive.. And, he adds immediately afterward, the difficulty of portraying the sinister world that surrounds him: “My intention was to paint the reality we live in. I didn’t succeed—reality is so powerful! I will keep trying; I feel an urgent need to achieve even a glimpse of the terrible reality.”³⁷Yrarrázaval, Ricardo. Letter to Nemesio Antúnez. November 13, 1983. Nemesio Antúnez Foundation Archive..

Ricardo Yrarrázaval certainly knew a thing or two about glimpses at that time, since it was precisely to capture fleeting everyday scenes that, after the remodeling of Ahumada Street, the artist wandered the pedestrian walkway with a small camera, thus abandoning “his introverted and abstract world” to “capture life out there” ³⁸Yaconi, Ana María. 2014. “Presentation”. Ricardo Yrarrázaval: 1952-2014 . Santiago de Chile: Foramen Acus. 10.. And, suddenly, the painter found himself out in the open, in the middle of a busy street populated by countless businessmen who, impeccably dressed in ties, hurried along among the other passersby, mingling with those shoppers who, attracted by the gleaming merchandise displayed in the shop windows, had also come there. And whose brilliance undoubtedly evokes the then also gleaming Santiago Metro, whose modern layout can be imagined, in the words of Pedro Lemebel, as “the disciplined evidence left to us by the dictatorship”³⁹Lemebel, Pedro. 2010. “El metro de Santiago”. De perlas y cicatrices . Santiago de Chile: Seix Barral. 245.. Suspiciously fleeting bodies, those that, as in a kind of spectral apparition, barely leave a luminous trail. As is also confirmed by the photographs of Paseo Ahumada taken around 1983 by Paz Errázuriz (fig. 14), included in the first edition of Lihn’s poem. And in which the spectral transience of those who wander with notable haste contrasts, to a great extent, with the starched groups of gentlemen ostentatiously dressed with orderly neatness (fig. 15). Who else but those men in suits who, in Yrarrázaval’s eighties paintings, appear under the sinister halo of suspicion, true emblems of that gray world which, as we have seen, the artist dedicates himself to portraying after the coup?

Figure 14. Photograph of Paz Errázuriz reproduced in El Paseo Ahumada by Enrique Lihn, 1983.

Figure 15. Photograph of Paz Errázuriz reproduced in El Paseo Ahumada by Enrique Lihn, 1983.

From this perspective, I critically examine the exhibitions at Galería Cromo as a true prism capable of redirecting Yrarrázaval’s work, as the artist leaves behind the interiors depicted in his early portraits to delve fully into the city streets. For this, he turns to photography: an artistic device that not only allows him to visually capture some of the fleeting glimpses he sees during his meandering walks through downtown Santiago, but also enables him to later spectralize his paintings through the distorted projection of these images onto the canvas. And I say fleeting because, viewed through the lens of Lihn’s verses, the walks that Ricardo Yrarrázaval takes along Paseo Ahumada in the late seventies and early eighties are revealed to us as striated by the specter of disappearance, which, in this case, refers fundamentally to the loss of his own identity. The dispossession inherent in the modern city, as Altamirano comments in an interview for Cromo in May 1977, invites us to reflect on the relationship established between “man”, the “urban landscape” and the “suffocation” in the oppressive urban horizon of the “anonymizing” modern world.⁴⁰Altamirano, Carlos. 1977. Four Chilean engravers. Santiago de Chile: Galería Cromo. n.p..

Because these men in suits and ties who cross Paseo Ahumada always appear distorted and cropped in Yrarrázaval’s 1980s work, just as the human bodies photographed inside the Santiago Metro in Altamirano’s exhibition catalog (fig. 16) do, emphatically highlighting how modernization operates like a straitjacket, an oppressive framework—sometimes bodily, sometimes urban—that crushes any trace of individuality in the modern subject. Except, of course, for those who have been pathetically relegated to the margins, and whose disfigured silhouette takes shape in the animalistic, begging sway of the Penguin when, faced with the indifference of other passersby, he proclaims his pathetic spectacle in full view of those who hurry past him. Because, like the rigidity of movement imposed by any tie on its wearer, the standardized routes of the subway are revealed to us, through photographs of Santiago, Chile , as the forced bodily discipline that they truly are. This is an illumination that Yrarrázaval himself also incorporates into his paintings of that period, not only through the frenetic haste that distorts the silhouettes of the commuters, but above all, through the uncertain aura of suspicion that crosses their faces.

Fig. 16. Interior of exhibition catalog Santiago de Chile, Galería Cromo, 1977

As Verónica Waissbluth recalls, the artist “began painting over those photographs projected onto the canvas, which is why his work became more raw and realistic”⁴¹Waissbluth, Verónica. 2012. Great Contemporary Chilean Artists. Ricardo Yrarrázaval . Santiago, Chile: Galería Cecilia Palma. 42.. But this realism is by no means devoid of the unreal quality that characterizes his portraits of the previous decade, insofar as their silhouettes appear out of focus, blurred by the standardized modern haste that the city imposes on their bodies. This is the case, for example, in an oil on canvas from 1980 titled With the Street Set (fig. 17), where the rigidity of the immaculate tie adorning the man’s neck—that “Gordian knot,” in Lihn’s words⁴²Lihn, Enrique. 1983. The Ahumada Promenade . Santiago, Chile: Minga Editions. n.p.—contrasts radically with the indefiniteness of a body blurred to such an extreme that it acquires a ghostly quality. Lost behind his hat, the man’s strange gaze is blinded by thick glasses that distort his face, as if disfiguring him. Perhaps seeking to emphasize, in this way, a kind of strangeness in the eyes of such an elegant gentleman. And there are even cases where passersby become deformed through a perverse play of perspective when projecting the negatives onto the canvas, as happens, for example, in an untitled oil on canvas from 1980 (fig. 18), based on the same photograph by Yrarrázaval on which Clipper Class (fig. 19), another oil on canvas from 1983, is based.

Fig. 17. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, With the street open, 1980

Fig. 18. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Untitled , 1980

Fig. 19. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Clipper class , 1983. Il Posto Collection

Fig. 20. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Return , 1980

Fig. 21. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, The Weight of His Conviction , 1980

Fig. 22. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, The Informant , 1983

, given that, after the discovery of fifteen skeletons in Lonquén at the end of 1978, that policy of extermination that, until then, the Chilean dictatorship had wanted to hide began to become increasingly evident.⁴³ In November 1978, five years after the coup that gave rise to the Chilean civic-military dictatorship, a large number of human skeletons were discovered inside an old lime kiln in Lonquén, a rural Chilean town located in the commune of Talagante, near Isla de Maipo, in the south-central part of the Metropolitan Region. Following the discovery, the Vicariate of Solidarity – an organization of the Catholic Church in Chile created to defend human rights during those years – was responsible for verifying and reporting the fact to the Supreme Court, which ultimately determined that the remains corresponded to those of fifteen people detained by the Chilean Carabineros at the Isla de Maipo police station on October 7, 1973. (See “Lonquén Kilns. Year 1978” on the website of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights )

Fig. 23. Back cover of exhibition catalog Santiago de Chile , Galería Cromo, 1977

From face to trail

In August 1973, just days before the coup, the exhibition *Imagination Is the Madwoman of the House* was held at the National Museum of Fine Arts , featuring works by Ricardo Yrarrázaval, Juan Pablo Langlois, Roser Bru, and Nemesio Antúnez. Among the human silhouettes Yrarrázaval exhibited in this group show (where, as Antonio Echeverría notes, the artist “exhibited institutionally and in Chile for the first time” ⁴³Echeverría, Antonio. 2025. * Ricardo Yrarrázaval. Three Decades *. Santiago, Chile: Il Posto. 7.), the striking absence of faces is remarkable. This is evidenced, for example, by *

Fig. 24. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, His Ego , 1973. Bartholdson Collection

Fig. 25. Ricardo Yrarrázaval, No Turning Back , 1980. Bartholdson Collection

This unmistakable figurative impulse that began to take shape in Yrarrázaval’s work after the coup, and which gives face to his subjects, is in no way unrelated to an irresistible compulsion to distort . This compulsion, by dialectically striating his production, leads him to blur those faces and silhouettes that he so relentlessly pursues to portray. And of whose identity, incidentally, barely a trace remains. Hence, in the pastels and oil paintings that the artist produced in the seventies and eighties, reality is evidently portrayed literally, but at the same time blurred in a gesture of hallucinatory lethargy. And I say lethargy because, as in the worst of nightmares, Yrarrázaval’s work seems to portray the reality that is perhaps lived obliquely, under the wing of dreams, when daily life is presented to us as disrupted by our most intimate fears. A nightmare that, as we have seen, is even more sinister when we understand that, ultimately, it is absolutely real, since the disfigured silhouettes of the sinister men in ties take shape in the streets of Santiago. And the lesson, without a doubt, can be read in light of the artist’s very brief time at Galería Cromo, back in ’77, on the mezzanine of Ahumada 254: that refurbished furniture store whose thick walls separated its inhabitants from the horrifying urban bustle, but in which the sinister urban clatter seeped through a tireless drilling in which the military shrapnel reverberated.