Algo pendiente
Algo pendiente (Something unfinished)
I would have needed a little encouragement, a little kindness,
leaving my way somewhat open ; instead of it, you closed it for me,
undoubtedly with the good intention that I took another way.
Franz Kafka
“Letter to the Father”
Mainly linked to painting, Alejandra Rojas Contreras’s work has been exploring different ways to allow the coexistence of pictorial fragments in a recurring exercise of rupture and re-composition. River composition (2014), It is your bluish sky (2013) and Something in the air (2012), among other works, reflect a recurring action in the artist: fragmenting an image and working from the parts corresponding to a whole, which is revealed in its drawing and color. Her intimate relationship with mosaic and specifically with Antoni Gaudi’s work, to which she dedicated much of her time on a research conducted in London and Barcelona between 2011 and 2013, is a great demonstration of her interest in the layout and pictorial construction from small or large items.
By recognizing in her career this recurring inclination and coupled with investigating the possibilities of abstraction through color, “Something unfinished” is rather a biographical accent. There aren’t the usual green and blue which appear in most of the artist’s works, where there is an absence of the human figure and an ethereal atmosphere that suggests an outside landscape. Instead, this exhibition brings together six images that make up an inner landscape extended in a relationship of abandonment with her father and an exhaustive search to rebuild his memory and thus her bond with him.
From the transfer and the photographs intervention of her late father on paper, the artist suggests various glazes or thin layers of color in an innocent attempt to step in a still image and make it permeable. Then, reflecting on parental lack would mean raising the father´s image and allowing her to have an authorial creation about him in order to alter everything that in life was unlikely.
This exhibition is the first station of a roaming that includes three more stops. From the Italian Cultural Institute -and in an airmail painting format- it will move to Hospital San José, then Concón, and finally the work is going to travel to Pistoia, Italy. Considering the family bond between the artist and these places (respectively; the place of her father´s death, her childhood summer house and the link with her paternal family from Pistoia), the exhibition will visit the past, in a process of repairing a fragmented emotional state, facing the turmoil that keeping something unfinished generates.
Far from intending criticizing and condemning what a child could consider as lack of affection, these pieces seek their own way, or as Kafka said “leaving my way somewhat open”, as a new tool to allow speculating about a better future.
Ximena Moreno Maira
Julio 2015
