Eugenio Dittborn

Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1943

            Eugenio Dittborn an enormously powerful figure in the Chilean contemporary art scene, thanks to the central role he played in the process of renovating local artistic practices during the Pinochet dictatorship. After an extensive and varied training in Europe, he returned to his country in 1972, where he still lives today and, together with his colleagues, Ronald Kay and Catalina Parra, organized several exhibitions at the Galería Época and published a series of texts at the experimental publishing house V.I.S.U.A.L. In 1985, he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and, in the 1980s, he became a member of the Escuela de Santiago, together with other important Chilean artists.

            Dittborn's trajectory is the culmination of the emergence of a repertoire of artistic tools and strategies that will see their first modulations in Chile. Together, video art, the world of printing and graphics, and artist's books form a laboratory in which the limits between writing and visuality become indiscernible, in which montage and juxtaposition coexist with a desire for communication and contact with the spectator, reformulating the terms of a conventional aesthetic experience.

            He became internationally renowned for his aeropostal paintings on various fabric or canvas supports, where the artist introduces graphic traces of paint, splashes, stitching, and photographs, among other flexible elements that, folded and placed in specially designed envelopes, are sent to different latitudes through the mail. Once received, his "messages" exhibit not only their contents but also the traces of his trajectory inscribed in their folds. This method allowed him to give an account of the globalization process in the making and of the Chilean political situation, marked by confinement, censorship, and precariousness.

            In many of the pieces, a structural play between a geometric composition with random and semi-figured shapes can be seen. The nature of Dittborn's painting will be marked by the movement to which it is exposed, making the aeropostal paintings transitory objects. Conceived with transport in mind, the numbered pieces are always existing between two formats and two states: their epistolary moment, folded and packed, and their exhibition moment, on full display.