Series of paintings, organized in polyptychs, to study the eriazo sites (wastelands) of Santiago city.

I took the wastelands because it was a landscape that impressed me within the city, for its dumbness, for a certain normalized desolation. For being a residue of the history of urban movements and at that moment for me, also a residue of a history (social, political, cultural and personal) confused, obscure and not satisfactorily narrated or represented. In a certain way I sensed an uncountable and unrepresentable history in its complexity.

But the wasteland was also a challenge for painting. An atypical landscape, a distant relative of the romantic ruin, a modern ruin without shame or glory that borders on the spontaneous garbage dump. One more modern contradiction.

Painting the wasteland was difficult. It had no important visual landmarks, except for its topographic limits and some visually degraded objects, which served to “assemble” the foreground and, with this, the pictorial illusion of three-dimensionality.

Their color could even challenge the photographic register that I made: a gray monochrome, of a dull and neutral gray, that tinged all the elements that were on the site. In turn, this same gray is scattered throughout the city, appearing when it has not been radically covered by another surface. It is the color of the periphery, and in a linear tour of Santiago, it signifies the approach to its neighborhoods, which begins to be noticed upon seeing this tone of neutrality, the gray of a parched earth, which appears persistently. This sensation of periphery, of unfinished, precarious, poorly made or poorly planned city, could be perceived in these wastelands of downtown Santiago.

The painting procedure I used -mainly gouaches and grisaille (lean oil)- led me towards an immaterial, washed-out image, which gave the painting the status of a backdrop.

At that moment, for me, the human figure was totally closed as a possibility, due to its excess of narrative, and the landscape would be for a long time the terrain where I would travel with my work.

But these paintings with the character of a backdrop, of large dimensions, lacked a figure, a protagonist. What I found as a figure were style frames painted as trompe l’oeil that framed these sites and a not very triumphant and precarious pictorial procedure.