Claudia Paine · Michelle Hostolaza · Quin France
POSTESCUELA, Models of the Own and the Other
Let's return to Chile's first painting and craft academies towards the end of the 18th century. We can observe that something of that historical condition is still sustained as a method for instructing a Visual Arts student: representing reality through different techniques and disciplines. Even the most dematerialized version, typical of the second avant-garde of the 20th century, in which art is no longer assumed as an object to be made but as a way through which life is made, has not been able to explain or constitute itself as a method unless through the exercise of understanding the mechanisms of representation, only to later negate them. In the local classroom, its exercise is still a ritual before moving on to the more experimental practices that contemporary art offers us. It is a ritual centered around that still life or nude body that the student must imitate through matter: a model.
If we acknowledge the presence of a model, we can also observe the paradox that this word entails. When it is worked from the outside, it becomes that pattern to follow, an exemplary paradigm that we must faithfully copy to achieve excellence; but at the same time, the model, declined into action, within the matter, suggests the possibility of shaping, that is, molding a new form and thus giving rise to something non-preexistent.
From contemporary art practices, the word "creation" opposes the word "representation" since representing the world as it is implies abandoning all possibility of imagining another world. To create, however, would be to invent one or many worlds. However, the model seems necessary to imagine that which does not yet exist to generate an image from a shared code, as the modification of its use will open a small gap through which what is represented no longer coincides with reality and vice versa. Sara Ahmed says that when something fulfills its function, it ceases to be seen and that when this exact thing stops functioning or is used for an unforeseen purpose, or it breaks, it can only then appear in our consciousness, and therefore, "a break can be the way something is revealed." To some extent, this is what contemporary art does, revealing what is inside the matter, breaking its utility, estranging the gaze, dismantling the use of the model as a figure to make the background in which it is inscribed appear: the possibility or impossibility of a world.
The exhibition Postescuela: Models of the Own and the Other brings together the work of Claudia Paine, Quin France, and Michelle Hostolaza, who not only share a common formative origin but also respond, in resistance or with some nostalgia, to those archetypes that we must un-model to look at them again, to emancipate their normative representation: education, family, and sexuality. Sometimes closer, sometimes further apart, like a diagram whose contact zones are not necessarily in materials, procedures, or visual typologies but in the break each artist problematizes by placing these archetypes as personal forms or external impositions.
Through manual techniques and materials typical of the primary Chilean school stage, Claudia Paine constructs a questioning of the institutionality from her experience studying visual arts and educational models. In the iteration of the futile and tedious gesture of making paper balls, she reveals the irony of early childhood education that makes coloring symbols of power and national emblems by the margin. How much do territory and Chilean identity feel like ours when taught as unquestionable truths? Paine inverts the representational logic of the official homeland: strength, valor, honor, identity, equality, etc., to return us to real life with its touches of melancholy, subtleties, breaks, and impossibilities. Those symbols introduced as ours and transversal are, in reality, alien, just as schoolwork can be an absurd and alienating exercise. However, in the artist's hands, which endlessly press these little paper balls, the margin is blurred, and time passes, freed from all sense of utility.
On one side, Quin France's work is composed of an object-based proposal where he articulates homoerotic scenes in tension with the masculine imagery of war. Figures industrially constructed to represent war subjects are manipulated to make their bodies into sculptural forms of sexual exchanges. On the other hand, in textile drawings where various sexual postures, solitary and in groups, appear-this time more related to play, humor, and celebration-the figures refuse the patriarchal model; instead, they are phallic forms made with soft fabrics and embroidery thread on suspended plastic backgrounds, which in turn become a personal exploration revealed with total transparency, as if what belongs to another could never be considered something foreign to oneself.
Michelle Hostolaza, on the other hand, presents a series of paintings where we can recognize a narrative related to memory and forgetfulness. The photographic image is translated into painting, not to be represented or imitated, but to make the blurred and residual background of memory appear through the diluted pictorial gesture, embodying the unsettling sensation of childhood scenes, using saturations and chromatic tones from analog photographs taken from the family album and her archive. This photographic model, which was used to treasure the milestones of shared life, has become an archaeological object, the remnant of a world that has ceased to exist. In turn, some of the painting supports are collected from the street, fragments, and scraps of furniture that have fallen into disuse. Memory, furniture, photography, and childhood move in a limbo between the personal and the foreign, between the dispossessed memory and one's history; they are the obsessive exercise of revealing within them the record of a familiar universe softened and worn down through images loaded with childhood nostalgia.
Isabel Croxatto Galería exhibits the works of three artists who graduated in January 2024 from the Escuela de Arte at Universidad Diego Portales. The show does not propose new models with the positivist spirit of those early painting academies but instead gives space to creation that moves in the place of impossibility, in introspective and manual tasks that delve into an uncertain world or offer us a form to delve into the depths, what Jean-Luc Nancy defines when he says that "art makes us go by the depths and, in that sense, shipwreck is there assured."
If we acknowledge the presence of a model, we can also observe the paradox that this word entails. When it is worked from the outside, it becomes that pattern to follow, an exemplary paradigm that we must faithfully copy to achieve excellence; but at the same time, the model, declined into action, within the matter, suggests the possibility of shaping, that is, molding a new form and thus giving rise to something non-preexistent.
From contemporary art practices, the word "creation" opposes the word "representation" since representing the world as it is implies abandoning all possibility of imagining another world. To create, however, would be to invent one or many worlds. However, the model seems necessary to imagine that which does not yet exist to generate an image from a shared code, as the modification of its use will open a small gap through which what is represented no longer coincides with reality and vice versa. Sara Ahmed says that when something fulfills its function, it ceases to be seen and that when this exact thing stops functioning or is used for an unforeseen purpose, or it breaks, it can only then appear in our consciousness, and therefore, "a break can be the way something is revealed." To some extent, this is what contemporary art does, revealing what is inside the matter, breaking its utility, estranging the gaze, dismantling the use of the model as a figure to make the background in which it is inscribed appear: the possibility or impossibility of a world.
The exhibition Postescuela: Models of the Own and the Other brings together the work of Claudia Paine, Quin France, and Michelle Hostolaza, who not only share a common formative origin but also respond, in resistance or with some nostalgia, to those archetypes that we must un-model to look at them again, to emancipate their normative representation: education, family, and sexuality. Sometimes closer, sometimes further apart, like a diagram whose contact zones are not necessarily in materials, procedures, or visual typologies but in the break each artist problematizes by placing these archetypes as personal forms or external impositions.
Through manual techniques and materials typical of the primary Chilean school stage, Claudia Paine constructs a questioning of the institutionality from her experience studying visual arts and educational models. In the iteration of the futile and tedious gesture of making paper balls, she reveals the irony of early childhood education that makes coloring symbols of power and national emblems by the margin. How much do territory and Chilean identity feel like ours when taught as unquestionable truths? Paine inverts the representational logic of the official homeland: strength, valor, honor, identity, equality, etc., to return us to real life with its touches of melancholy, subtleties, breaks, and impossibilities. Those symbols introduced as ours and transversal are, in reality, alien, just as schoolwork can be an absurd and alienating exercise. However, in the artist's hands, which endlessly press these little paper balls, the margin is blurred, and time passes, freed from all sense of utility.
On one side, Quin France's work is composed of an object-based proposal where he articulates homoerotic scenes in tension with the masculine imagery of war. Figures industrially constructed to represent war subjects are manipulated to make their bodies into sculptural forms of sexual exchanges. On the other hand, in textile drawings where various sexual postures, solitary and in groups, appear-this time more related to play, humor, and celebration-the figures refuse the patriarchal model; instead, they are phallic forms made with soft fabrics and embroidery thread on suspended plastic backgrounds, which in turn become a personal exploration revealed with total transparency, as if what belongs to another could never be considered something foreign to oneself.
Michelle Hostolaza, on the other hand, presents a series of paintings where we can recognize a narrative related to memory and forgetfulness. The photographic image is translated into painting, not to be represented or imitated, but to make the blurred and residual background of memory appear through the diluted pictorial gesture, embodying the unsettling sensation of childhood scenes, using saturations and chromatic tones from analog photographs taken from the family album and her archive. This photographic model, which was used to treasure the milestones of shared life, has become an archaeological object, the remnant of a world that has ceased to exist. In turn, some of the painting supports are collected from the street, fragments, and scraps of furniture that have fallen into disuse. Memory, furniture, photography, and childhood move in a limbo between the personal and the foreign, between the dispossessed memory and one's history; they are the obsessive exercise of revealing within them the record of a familiar universe softened and worn down through images loaded with childhood nostalgia.
Isabel Croxatto Galería exhibits the works of three artists who graduated in January 2024 from the Escuela de Arte at Universidad Diego Portales. The show does not propose new models with the positivist spirit of those early painting academies but instead gives space to creation that moves in the place of impossibility, in introspective and manual tasks that delve into an uncertain world or offer us a form to delve into the depths, what Jean-Luc Nancy defines when he says that "art makes us go by the depths and, in that sense, shipwreck is there assured."
Camila Ramírez, artist and academic
Bernardita Croxatto, artist and academic
School of Art, UDP
Bernardita Croxatto, artist and academic
School of Art, UDP
[1] Sarah Ahmed, ¿Para qué sirve? Sobre los usos del uso, Bellaterra, S.L., Barcelona, 2020, p. 39
[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, La imagen: mímesis & méthexis, en Emmanuel Ulloa (comps), Pensar la imagen, Metales Pesados, Santiago, 2020, p. 71