Our friend Pablo Aravena is curating a great show at Carmichael Gallery in Los Angeles, that opens its doors tomorrow night

Chile Estyle
Group Exhibition – Agotok, Cekis, Horate, Inti and La Robot De Madera
Curated by Pablo Aravena

For the first time in North America, Chile Estyle will showcase work from a comprehensive selection from the top tier of Chile’s contemporary urban muralists.
Whilst making NEXT: A Primer on Urban Painting (Rotterdam International Film Festival 2006), my documentary film about the global culture of street art, I travelled to many of the world’s street art capitals. Upon returning to my native Chile after an eight year hiatus, I was amazed and delighted by the quality and development of the art form there. I spent time with many of the leading figures in the Chilean scene and I was able to gain and share insights and viewpoints on the global and local aspects of the movement. I realized that we Chileans had a long history in this art form and that my generation had taken those traditions and built a strong community that was rooted in our past yet evolving in the present into the future. Through my exploration of the Chilean street art world, I discovered things I did not know about my own culture and my country’s history.

From the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in the early 90’s until now, Chilean street art has literally exploded into a highly developed style, bearing strong influences from Mexican muralism, 60s – 70s political mural brigades, wildstyle graffiti and Brazilian graffiti and pixação (a unique stylistic cross-pollination with street art from Sao Paulo in the mid-90s). These influences, paired with Chile’s distinct history of propaganda art and muralism dating from the 40s, give rise to the myriad of strongly developed personal visual languages and artistic self-expression seen on the streets of Santiago, Valparaiso and other cities in Chile.

I wanted to share the discovery of the vibrant Chilean community with a North American audience, which led me to propose this exhibition to Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The Chile Estyle featured artists, Cekis, Inti, Horate, La Robot de Madera and the duo Agotok, are representative of the first and second generation of artists that started working on the streets in the Post-Pinochet era. The exhibition will consist of new works on canvas as well as site-specific individual and group mural installations in the gallery.

Cekis/Nelson, originally from Santiago belongs to the first generation of post-dictatorship urban artists and is a pioneer in the Latin American graffiti scene. He is currently working on representing multiculturalism, via the portrait and the exaltation of details of the common man. He is exploring mass culture and its global effects like the juxtaposing of traditions, trends and customs. In his work he creates multilayered, multicolored compositions, working with close ups of the human body, brands and text.

Cekis currently lives in NY and has been part of different exhibitions, group shows and cultural projects. To date, he has had exhibitions at The Rotunda BRIC, Brooklyn Arts Council, BOPA (Baltimore Office for the promotion of the Arts), The Bronx Museum, and the Lower East Side Printshop.

Horate, another old school street artist with a background in stencils and graffiti now brings us a highly developed painterly style, which explores themes of nature, animals and abstractions. While he works mainly in Santiago and Valparaiso, Horate for this show draws upon his experiences as a national park attendant in the famous Torres del Paine national park, creating a rich, Patagonia-inspired body of work.  Horate recently had a solo show at Galeria Isabel Aninat in Santiago de Chile.

Inti, hailing from Viña del Mar and working mainly in Valparaiso, works with a unique spectral albino iconography, which he combines with symbols and icons from pre-Colombian cultures to create sophisticated, near-abstract figurative work. He has exhibited and worked in Chile, Norway, Sweden and France.

La Robot de Madera from Quillota is a member of the new wave of artists to paint on the streets of Chile in the contemporary style. He has a distinctly personal figurative language, painting only human forms with text and abstract backgrounds reminiscent of the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and the political mural group Brigada Ramona Parra. He works mainly in Valparaiso and other towns in the V region of Chile.

Agotok are a self-taught duo inspired by graffiti and the mural work of the Brigada Ramona Parra. They belong to the second generation of urban artist in Chile. By incorporating Chilean folk and popular cultures with social and political themes, they create artwork firmly rooted in common people and their everyday lives.

This important exhibition showcases a very Chilean visual fabric that will dazzle the American public and offer an insight into a powerhouse of South American street art. The selection is based on strong individual styles which, when grouped together, offer a perspective of the themes, styles and cultural flavor present in the contemporary Chilean street art scene.

Pablo Aravena

Curator

Chile Estyle exhibition