Isabel Croxatto Galería presents Llave de Paso, Camilo Ortega Prieto’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Drawing on the landscape and material conditions of the Atacama Desert, the artist reflects on water and the relationships among territory, economy, and ways of life in a context defined by scarcity.
Through painting, installation, and a performative dimension, Ortega constructs an imaginary in which pipes, mining infrastructure, and desert expanses coexist with gardens, swimming pools, tourism, and other images associated with well-being and everyday life. Seemingly distant elements that nevertheless share the same condition: they all depend on the availability and circulation of water.
The exhibition examines the contradictions of a territory where water sustains both everyday life and extractive processes, as well as promises of development. In a landscape where its availability is not guaranteed, access to water also acquires economic and strategic value and can become an expression of privilege, shaping ways of inhabiting and transforming the territory.
Within this context, the infrastructures designed to channel, distribute, and regulate water take on a central presence in the project. The water valve—a familiar mechanism used to open, close, or control a flow—gives the exhibition its title and functions as a metaphor for access and control: who manages water, who can access it, and under what conditions a natural resource fundamental to life is distributed.
From the Atacama Desert, Llave de Paso brings together landscapes, infrastructures, and ways of inhabiting the territory to examine the different forms of value water acquires when it becomes scarce, and the tensions that emerge between life, economy, territory, and desire.
