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Isabel Croxatto Galería is pleased to present the work of Chilean artists Mara Faúndez and Joaquín Reyes in Foundations Summer 2025, a curated dialogue that brings together two singular visions of contemporary painting within the current landscape of new figuration. From this shared territory, Faúndez and Reyes trace intimate worlds through distinct visual languages. She evokes emotional memory through color and female figures, each a variation of herself. He repeats gestures like a ritual: frontal, deliberate, and precise. Though their practices remain independent, this joint presentation allows their works to resonate across differences, echoing each other’s tensions, obsessions, and pictorial logic.
Mara Faúndez’s painting is rooted in the anecdotal and affective. Raised in the rural landscapes of central Chile, her work draws on the intimacy of personal experience: fleeting passions, domestic symbols, and the ambiguity of desire. Through lush color and layered compositions, she constructs emotional spaces populated by symbolic objects and female figures that act as refracted selves. Her approach is intuitive, and painting becomes a space of confrontation between memory, fiction, and sensuality.
Joaquín Reyes develops his practice from a disciplined investigation of the material and physical conditions of painting. His visual language is shaped by self-imposed rules—gestures repeated until a method emerges. Working always frontally and from the center outward, his compositions construct a visual grammar grounded in rhythm and corporeality. Echoing Cézanne’s vision of the canvas as a scanning plane, Reyes flattens pictorial space to confront the viewer directly, collapsing depth into presence.
Together, Faúndez and Reyes offer two paths through the expressive potentials of contemporary figuration—intersecting not in narrative but in the shared intensity of their material and conceptual inquiries.
