Pablo Linsambarth (Chile, 1989) has been building in recent years a solid and powerful work, clearly critical of the social and historical narrative that precedes him. In his paintings, and even in his videos, he has been able to fuse the various forms of sociability, through exercises that generate different narrative planes and that reveal the visual and political memory of a personal archive in continuous construction.
If in his previous pictorial works we could distinguish a diversity of elements in the midst of wide areas of color: landscapes, faces, silhouettes, animals and still lifes, ghostly fragments of a family photographic album alternating in different perspectives and planes like buried layers that re-emerge again and again depending on our gaze; Today his painting plays with his own vocabulary at ease with formal and narrative structures to provoke changes in the anthropophagic manner of meaning in the image, thus generating a densely constructed network of meanings that attempts to observe and account for cultural codes or clichés of the Latin American context that proliferate and change, as well as the ways in which the visual symbols of language can undergo transformations when exposed to cultural codes often indecipherable by the viewer.
In this sense, should all Latin American narrative be understood as a form of transmission of meaning? What are the benefits of a communication system that defies translation and only creates fragments of an unfinished present or memory? What is the pictorial relationship between representation and language from the global South?
From this place of questions, Pablo Linsambarth's paintings in this new series "Los cruces y la selva colorada" (The crossings and the red jungle) conceived for the Vigil Gonzales gallery (Cusco, Peru) reflect on the strategies of production of the Latin American, and its forms of circulation. If this same reflection crossed and encouraged the left in the 60s and 70s, materializing in different radical movements that politically activated the debates on the local and the global, the intimate and the public, including from the visual arts in their production avant-garde experiences that traveled from the biographical, the erotic, the chromatic, the tactile and sound, thereby expanding the reflection of the alternative subjectivity of this part of the world; Today these same visualities emerge in Pablo's painting as a critique of the solidification of this becoming and a staging of identity where popular iconography and social struggles are ambiguously combined to create forms of social sensibility. This context serves Pablo as a test notebook to stage different erased myths, unknown oral histories, close and dissimilar narratives that claim a special place in the visible archive of the Latin American that is being built since the beginning of the 20th century.
Victor López Zumelzu
