“Detention at Dignity Square” –oil on linen, 47 x 47 in– depicts the front view of the Baquedano Metro station’s Exit B in Santiago, as it was at the end of October 2019. The painting is executed with a limited palette, as well as with a brushstroke in constant horizontal movement, giving an impression of motion blur, while the mismatch of colors refers to the inexact filter of some analog medium.
This painting only points to the place, the ex post image, of one of the epicenters of the social uprising. But above all, it presents us, in its rigid frontality, the inaccessibility of the place both metaphorically and concretely: whether due to the closure of the station as a metro station, as well as its hermetic nature in relation to the allegations of the space as a host of human rights violations, not entirely clarified.
The painting becomes an image not completely in motion, nor completely still, both diffuse and blurred, to speak to us of a moment still in transition, still without an outcome, awaiting a social rearticulation that will finally shape this historic moment in pause.”
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