Desperté Lleno de Presagios | Coco González Lohse: Centro Cultural de Las Condes

Coco González is a neo-conceptual and neo-pop artist—a creator, producer, editor, and recycler of both his own images and those of others. In his practice, the act of recovering images carries within it their very extinction: not only as icons, but as matter, as bodies that wear down and transform. Through oil painting and printmaking, he has developed over more than thirty years a body of work that portrays and self-portrays the everyday, social, cultural, and political life of Chile.

 

Trained at the University of Chile, while simultaneously self-taught in forging his own path, González conceives of the image as a biographeme: visual traces that mark vital and collective trajectories, behaving as "beings with a life of their own," accompanying us like relatives within both personal and social memory. In this universe, the hierarchies between high and low culture dissolve: all images-artworks, photographs, or digital files-become equal in their circulation across screens, devices, and media.

In his artistic practice, images are re-appropriated, cut, edited, dematerialized, and re-materialized as paintings on canvas, paper, or wall. Without pedestals and without a single exclusive author, they acquire a new social existence. To remember and to cut becomes, in this sense, a gesture of release: a renunciation of certainties that allows the codes and messages of these images another chance to inhabit contemporaneity.

The exhibition Awoke Full of Omens unfolds across five thematic realms, spanning over 250 m² and bringing together nearly 120 works, objects, and videos. These realms are presented as traveling image-matter, revisiting with humor, sharpness, and tenderness both personal and collective imaginaries of Western culture, as well as those from diverse contexts. Each gallery space, guided by its title, functions as a chapter in a cultural syllabary that is in constant expansion.

 

The project also highlights a collaborative dimension, incorporating words and objects contributed by the artist's friends, video editing by Gonzalo Medel and Alex Letelier, and the significant participation of Bolivian artist and filmmaker Harold Céspedes, with his piece Stone Disc (2024), which enriches and expands the resonances of this visual odyssey.

 

More than a retrospective, Desperté Lleno de Presagios is an initiatory journey that moves between memory and oblivion, between the auratic and the worn, between the intimate and the collective. A cartography of images which, once de-hierarchized and recontextualized, invite us to experience what it means to live -and to survive- in a time saturated with signs.