This is the visual exercise that Chilean artist Wladymir Bernechea set out to explore in 2024, now exhibited for the first time in Santiago at the Montecarmelo Cultural Center. The exhibition comprises a series of oil paintings on canvas by Bernechea, who has dedicated over ten years exclusively to painting in Chile and in Mexico, where he currently resides.
To understand Bernechea’s operation, one must first unravel this visual exercise and consider it as a speculative opportunity to invent an imaginary history of Chilean art. To do this, he references works by 19th-century academic painters such as Alejandro Ciccarelli, Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma, Magdalena Mira, Juan Francisco González, Pedro Lira, Cosme San Martín, and Alfredo Valenzuela Llanos, intervening them with selected haikus and traditional Japanese poems by authors including Chiyo-ni, Den Sute-jo, Masaoka Shiki, Matsuo Bashō, Takashi Matsumoto, Tan Taigi, and Yosa Buson.
Analyzing each work, we observe how the initial reference mutates through the composition of scenes that verge on the uncanny, employing a grayscale palette that defines Bernechea’s body of work. The canonical representations of Chilean fine arts are thus deformed, giving rise to non-places and faceless figures inhabiting an unfamiliar space.
The inclusion of Japanese scripts furthers the intention of linking image and word—a poetic act in itself. Everything becomes visual, considering Japanese is not a commonly spoken language in Chile, yet symbolizes a post-1990s generation that absorbed Japanese culture through television. This influence is central to Wladymir's visual and literary production over the years.
In this way, the exhibition invites us to imagine the possibility of bridging two seemingly distinct art histories—Asian and Latin American—to construct a new one through their differences. Thus, we can invent shared scenarios and use painting as a formal tool to tell a story that does not exist, but one that can be recreated as many times as we wish—or need.
Camila Caris Seguel, Art Historian
Centro de Encuentros Culturales
July 2025
