Verena Urrutia
Florencia Loewenthal Santiago
Verena Urrutia emerged in Santiago in the 2000s, working in the field of photography, performance and video, and featuring images that used to show secretions, pieces of intimate clothing, the idea of the trace and the experience of the body. In her first solo exhibition of drawings, she shows a parallel line of work, more akin to comic strips. The link – she has explained – is the relationship of the human being with nature.
In a series of white canvases, unfinished characters drawn in black play some enigmatic role along landscapes that are hinted at, and in which bodies, trees, earth, stones or bushes emerge, disintegrated. Indian ink suddenly sprinkles red or black drops, outlining the trace of a gesture or of certain moods; at times, it looks like blood. Inspired by the work of Peter Bruegel, El Bosco or Goya in popular narratives, present-day caricatures and naturalistic illustrations, the artist weaves unfinished stories; between the white background and the line, between illustration and graphic work, between the moorland and life, there is a suspense, certain secret violence. Something is shown in the silence; some- thing is said without naming it, while the viewer beholds the human being as it succumbs between the earth and the void, and observes the body faced with its desolation.
