Landscape, painted, photographed or filmed, is not merely a record of a view; it's something beyond the representation of a location. From the moment the eye rests upon a place, a process begins, more or less intuitive, more or less rational, imprinting certain ways of seeing. Depending on the mediums, techniques, and methods used, the subsequent process of representation can entail numerous stages that gradually meld into the final construct.
The category of landscape has expanded significantly in recent decades, encompassing diverse concepts such as social landscape, sonic landscape, political landscape, and more; each with valuable arguments justifying their use. However, the notion of landscape, as a term, emerged just over four centuries ago as a pictorial genre. This genre intrinsically featured nature as its subject, such that the term "landscape" (or "paysage" in French) identified both the natural setting and the painting that depicted it. At its origin, then, landscape was inextricably linked to painting. Nowadays, as we know, other artistic mediums also explore and reinterpret it, and other disciplines study and analyze it.
Mara Santibañez refrained from painting for a while, exploring different directions. Upon returning to painting, she became enthralled with landscape. Her current work remains within the original conventions, enabling her to operate within the close affinity that exists between the forms, colors, lights, and shadows of nature and the brushstrokes, glazes, impastos, and drips of paint. This affinity has proven to be highly productive and relevant, as can be observed in the works of various contemporary painters.
Adhering to the original conventions doesn't equate to producing a conventional work. The paintings that Mara Santibañez creates result from a contemporary perspective, particularly focused on the ways in which nature has been affected by human actions. Above all, it's a perspective born from the present, filtered through cultural mediators and the devices that shape our perception.
The first group of paintings exhibited here originated from photographs taken from a moving vehicle along the road between Santiago and the fifth region. These photographs captured territories of our mountainous central area intersected by rows of vineyards and other crops. These geometric arrangements, needed by the perpetual need to optimize water resources, constitute an order executed in the pursuit of efficiency, particularly in agriculture. On the canvas, these arrangements transform into lines of paint, drips, impastos against diluted backgrounds. From these elements, an image somewhat insubstantial emerges among the spots, allowing the human order to become visible not only within the cultivation space but also implicitly in relation to the road and the flow of vehicles driven by commerce and tourism.
A second group, corresponding to the present year, is the result of attention given to certain stopping points along the route and also to roadside animitas (shrines). Although not directly represented here, the road is also significant, a symbol of modernity involving the presence of bus stops and the popular roadside shrines, monuments of popular religiosity marking tragic deaths due to car accidents. According to popular belief, the souls of those who died violently remain on earth. The living pray for their rest, and in exchange for prayers and offerings, the deceased assist the living in their requests. These rather rudimentary structures function as bodyless mausoleums where flowers and various objects are placed. They stand there at the roadside, displaying their disproportion, lack of refinement, kitsch aesthetic, or evident abandonment. Translated into the material of paint through spots that possess the remarkable quality of being both precise and diffuse, constructed with the exact balance to delicately stand out from the surroundings of soil and trees that other spots suggest. The shrines blend into the landscape, leaving the ambiguous feeling of presence-absence, a sensation that painting excels in evoking.
If the shrines don't host bodies, neither do the rural bus stops. Defined geometry and colors in the midst of the road, these small shelters serve to temporarily accommodate the living during their wait. Their function is eminently utilitarian, so their emptiness implies nothing more than their concrete presence and function. Far from tourist interest images, these paintings mark interruptions in the road with seemingly no aesthetic interest. Yet, turned into colorful spots, these views that were once photographs display visual allure as they combine with the subtle disturbance inherent in their desolate appearance.
The diverse landscapes that Mara Santibañez elaborates from photographic records possess a distinctive quality: the photographic operation essential for the development of the process remains invisibly implicated. It's virtually there, reflecting certain conditions of perception and its environment, but concretely, once on the canvas, pure painting becomes visible. Its materiality, resources, procedures are not present solely to describe crops, shrines, or bus stops (though they do), but they are laid bare in all their nakedness. Despite being mediated through photography, it is the pictorical which appears. Perhaps because painting itself is already present in the gaze that records the photo, a gaze not only mediated by the device, by culture, by experience, but primarily and peculiarly by the evolution of painting, its history, technique, and essence. When poured onto the canvas, what occurs is that the photographic condition implicated in the process takes on the curious form of something that is inevitable yet simultaneously elusive.
Text and Curatorship: María Elena Muñoz
April, 2021