“Summer had come to an end, and Mr. Sousa lingered in quiet contemplation in that solitary seaside resort… He found himself unexpectedly suspended between two moments in time.”
— Adolfo Couve, Balneario, 1993
BALNEARIO
That beach, that seaside resort abandoned every winter. The persistent labor of the water, which devotes centuries to mutating form, to defining this setting inhabited by those figures who take part in the summer, exposing their flesh to the sun. As a backdrop, the sky's color hangs, assigned to each scene according to the specific variations of every hour of the day: sometimes blue, sometimes red; dark and transparent, or dense, bursting with light.
But this is an imaginary seaside resort, constructed piece by piece across these canvases like an assembled montage; the motifs therefore repeat and reappear insistently in each painting that composes this exhibition. The same swimming pools, the same sharp palm trees, the same child in profile, partially submerged in the water. Elements that, distributed through multiple variations — and at the risk of being naive — allow me to approach the construction of my own seaside resort.
Nothing in this setting fully asserts itself as an action. The figures operate at a threshold: they do not act, they do not conclude, they do not settle. Each depends on a minimal alteration that could shift it elsewhere, change its course. There is no narrative, only the conditions for an event to take place.
Tomás Bravo Droguett
Santiago, April 2026
