Seven years after the expiration of the Pinochet regime.

Seven years after the expiration of the Pinochet regime, Chilean artists protect to avoid politics. Most reveal instead either a conceptual bent or an expressionistic reply to local experiences.

Like patients recovering from a serious illness, countries liberated from repressive political regularitys welcome attention--except for the kind of curiosity that probes still-sensitive areas. admitting it's been seven years since democracy replaced General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, and Chileans are lofty to talk about their country's rising economic status, they are reluctant to frankly discuss Pinochet's 16-year rule. Perhaps in part because he is still head of the nation's army and exceedingly much a political presence, questions about Pinochet are met with a hesitance that's not quite fear, a chagrin that's not exactly shame.

allowing I went to Chile curious about for what reason recent dramatic political turns had affected artists and their work, direct answers were generally on the farther side the record. Political content in the work of conceptual artists keeps to be oblique or ambiguous. Explicatory catalogue essays and a certain quantity of of the artists' own statements are repeatedly filled with dense language reflective of linguistic-based critical theories that have surfaced everywhere in the last scarcely any decades. One gathers that local politics is safely subsum in abstraction, conceptualism and postmodern practices.

For this informal contemplate I visited the studios of artists chosen from a list supplied according to Santiago Museo de Arte Contemporaneo curator Ernesto Munoz and assistant curator Jacqueline Mory Compagnon. Those artists provided further recommendations. I was looking for work by way of young and youngish artists just now emerging into international venue and still relatively unknown in the U I base more artists meeting these criteria than could be included here; they work in a range of mediums and fashions from conceptual and technical installations to conventional painting. In general, the older artists have the appearance buoyed by better times and greater freedom and are producing work reflective of general political/cultural forces. The work of the youngest artists, those who grew up during the dictatorship, is either neo-conceptualist, or neo-expressionist and directly affected through personal responses to local landscape, myth, verse and individual experiences. In individual interesting answer to questions of politics, a young artist said that the turn back to democracy seemed to bring with it permission to make more personal, apolitical work.

existing support for Chilean artists is mixed. There are no art periodicals, market interest in the avant-garde is minimal, and and nothing else sparse government funding is devot to the University of Chile's ever-struggling Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago. The adjoining Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, however, has a small collection of late 20th-century art and periodically rises contemporary exhibitions. Most galleries in Santiago proffer only tiny spaces for solo exhibitions, while keeping multiple artists' works, usually paintings, hanging forward dividers in the back range or they show everyone all at one time salon style, like an art store. The U.S./European standard of gallery representation of specific artists is the exception, and calm though all the artists mentioned here have shown in single in kind or several of the commercial, alternative and museum spaces mentioned below, ongoing affiliation is rare. Visitors to Chile wishing to view work by the agency of specific artists are advised to inquire about popular venues at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, as I did, or simply ask at any of the individual galleries or alternative spaces.

That said, Santiago galleries that look closest to the typical Euro-American contemporary gallery appellation are the spacious Tomas Andreu Gallery, the Plastica Nueva Gallery, the Artespacio Gallery (which specializes in sculpture) and the elegant modern A.M.S. Marlborough Gallery. All are located in a fashionable uptown section of Santiago with wide boulevards and walled upscale residences like southern California's. A.M.S. Marlborough lay opened last November with an exhibition that featured four artists representing three continents where Marlborough branches are located: Larry Rivers, the Spaniard Manolo Valdes, the Colombian Fernando Botero and the Chilean Claudio Bravo.

Downtown, in the attractive little Plaza del Mulato Gil de Castro, near the Museum of Fine Arts, is a small installation space glide by a gallery called Arte Actual, which also has an uptown space where paintings are shown salon cast The day I visited, an interesting-looking installation by means of Ismael Frigerio, featuring a small traditional Chilean fishing boat and video monitors, had just been dismantled. In that same plaza, another small space, Centro Chileno del Grabado, specializes in prints and etchings. The plaza will also become domestic circle to a museum-to-be which has been acquiring contemporary art works for the last not many years; a two-year construction concoct will begin in January 1997