Lo que solía ver por mi ventana | Wladymir Bernechea: Centro Cultural Las Condes

4 - 28 April 2024

What I used to see from my window

 
There are times when the question arises: will I ever forget everything?
We remember some landscapes and people almost photographically: their features, tears and scars, and the world we share. But time passes and the images become blurred, more like a mirage than reality. Then we are left with what we feel about memories: somewhere the expressions of our memory become subtle and slow or fast and aggressive. They can be memories that we wish were always with us... or that didn't exist.
 
In this logic, some images seem to come from nowhere, faces that have no particularity and are only individuals, while there are spaces that have no specific geography - they seem to be all people and all places at the same time, a mirror of us, our longings and melancholy. Every element in these paintings is a terrain of the strange, of what does not fit. If we find meaning in the representation, there is a dissonance (either from the act of covering up what has been created or from the placement of something that does not obey the logic of narrative) that brings these paintings closer to an idea of "composition", from the purest formality to emotionality.
 
In Lo que solía ver por mi ventana, paintings follow a visual tendency towards simplicity and the generalisation of forms; the fewer the factors, the more stable the image. Despite this, the works become complicated, blurred, reworked and, finally, foreign (like people). They present themselves as entities that can only exist in the margins of these pieces: this is their habitat and the only moment in which they live. In a way, these artworks resist being forgotten and want to be a mark like those memories that are no longer photographic but rather emotions of a moment that do not cease to remain.

 

Wladymir Bernechea, artist.
April 2024