Es tu cielo azulado

Es tu cielo azulado (It is your bluish sky)

One of the fundamental symbolic manifestations of the mystic western thought has been the sky vision. Since ancient days it has been represented in mural paintings, canvas, altarpieces or mosaics, as a confirmation of the cosmic Pantheon in Roma, which was afterward linked to a Christian perspective. This essential iconographic aspect was taken into consideration by the artist Alejandra Rojas Contreras when she set out her work for the first time, more than ten years ago. Her paintings were placed on the exterior wall of the main temple apse in Campus Oriente at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the place and time where Alejandra made her final project entitled Awareness of Unity.

The place chosen to locate her pictorial pieces was as important as the images -as it is nowadays. The building was built on a dialog between circles and squares, which mixed a fundamental relationship between earthly and heavenly. The circle reminded of sacred, since it does not begin or end; to the immaterial universe, whether the square reminded of the Earth condition with its four cardinal points, which created a direct dialog with the brick structure –baked earth- that embodies the building

The architectural symbology and the whole pictorial piece communicated with each other, being the sky-blue the predominant colour. Specifically, the word sky-blue comes from Latin caelestis, which means celestial, and this comes from caelum, meaning firmament, sky or gods’ abode.

On that basis, the paintings were dominated by blue-sky dye (or light blue) with an intense saturation, corresponding to the color of the clear daytime sky.

The piece that Alejandra shows us today at Espacio Matta Cultural Centre readjusts the first proposal, placing the work permanently in the building entrance (Bicentennial Project). It is next to a giant of the Palace of La Moneda, and it shares the space with the mural “The first goal of the Chilean people”, by the Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta and Brigada Ramona Parra in 1971. This mural had been erased by the military dictatorship and restored before the opening of this space in 2010.

This deep analogy, suggested by Alejandra, helps us to remember the human being’s spiritual orientation towards the light and what is beyond them, like the sunlight, the night manifestation of the star light and, certainly, the mystery of the blue skies.

Victoria Jiménez Martínez
Julio 2013