It/ Eso

It/Eso. Work composed of steel sheet, iridescent paint and four rocks as support. 2023. Sucre Building.

It/eso, is the most recent work by Cristián Salineros. Although it does not resemble anything in particular, it can be associated -in general- to that group of pieces created by the artist, which intertwine nature and technology. Organic life as a model was the guide for a pillar of modernity like Cézanne, who translated it through a reductive language unheard of until then; the same could be said of Cristián Salineros, and in his work, the forms of nature -without excluding any of its kingdoms- appear as an obsession and as a leitmotiv. He thus follows artists as disparate as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth or Isamu Noguchi, whose pieces -in one way or another- evoke the most varied repertoire of the organic world: bones, seeds, shells, and were easily linked to architecture and design. Those languages combined -in variable doses- materials, forms and constructive processes drawn from the organic world, with the modern knowledge of engineering and sculpture.

From his public beginnings as a sculptor, Cristián Salineros exhibited a language of simple lines and emphatic volumes. His works owed as much to nature as to industrial design or craftsmanship. From both, he extracted processes, materials, structures and returned them in the form of rotund volumes fluidly installed in the public space. Order and repetition also appeared as a possibility, if not as a premise for his assemblies, updating the basic premises of minimalism.

Evoking the beauty and order of the natural world seemed to be the substratum of all those works, something that the artist has made more explicit in recent productions, his large sculpture in Barnechea “Folding the Landscape” exemplifies it with a glazed form that reflects the landscape and returns it as a cubist painting, also his last exhibition in D21, where bird droppings are shown as plastic matter and even the origin of a particular sculptural configuration. To make the example a trinity, let us add the sculpture recently inaugurated at Santiago's international airport, which evokes both clouds and rocks.

Already installed in the Sucre building, “It/Eso” is a work that follows the artist's most recent concerns. The piece has the irregularity of an organic form, a metal sheet curves and describes the perimeter of what looks like an imaginary outline, as if a scribble drawn on a piece of paper, had risen from the sheet to take shape, but renouncing the thickness and preferring instead the emptiness. At its base, a metallic structure supports the volume and allows it to be anchored to four opposing rocks that serve as support. The material contrast is eloquent. The chrome surface of the form is the reverse of the rough texture of the stones, and is kept suspended, almost floating, thanks to them. What we see - from a distance - is an undulating structure that seems to rest on natural pillars, as if it were an architectural piece. The dozens of trees that grow abundantly around it and a few smaller rocks scattered a few meters from the work allow it to stand naturally in space, almost as if it were a natural part of that place.

Text by: César Gabler

Courtesy of Fundación Actual 
Photo credits: Freddy Ibarra
Audiovisual Direction: Freddy Ibarra