This is a series of paintings about electric towers, painted as if they were enormous sculptural monuments to an era that was about to disappear. What will we do with these amazing structures when they are already obsolete? I paint, according to me, as if I were in the future looking at the ruins of the 21st century, contemporary ruins. But I paint with oil, the oldest painting technique... the paradox of time in creation in this series.

Tower

The landscapes in this series are views taken from a moving vehicle along the highways of Chile. It's about looking at the contemporary landscape. Where land was previously painted, in these paintings they are asphalt floors. The landscape of these paintings is political because when we look from the highways, wherever we look, there is the fracture that this territorial planning generates.And there is painting, discovering possible landscapes in the territory and in that which is so everyday and fast, that we no longer see.

On the road

The Kancha is a very particular way of using the territory. A plane Intercepting the landscape and some graphic elements placed on that plane (arches). Absurd is the desire to have “green” fields in the central zone of Chile, therefore, many of these are synthetic grass fields, because in our permanent drought there is no green that survives. So, these are green planes that strive to resist, with the aim of becoming a meeting place.
The kanchas are good places and the "neighborhood pichanga" should be heritage. Neighborhood, neighborhood, they come from mud. Mud pits covered by a green carpet. What could speak better about Chile?

Cancha (sports field)

Series of paintings that pictorially show the ways in which we design the territory. These are monoculture plantations whose organization over the territory resembles a geometric grid that rests on top of the earth.

Cultivation

These paintings try, first, to study a motif greatly revised by the history of art: the sky, and give a contemporary meaning to such a traditional model.
It is also about looking for something like the “sound of the clouds". This is because I read that a deaf person, upon hearing for the first time, said in surprise that he thought the clouds made a sound when they collided.

The sound of the Clouds

"Animitas" is the name we give in Chile, and in Latin America, to the roadside shrine.
In these paintings we can see popular devotion and religiosity, on the one hand, and blur and speed, on the other. Curiously invisible, the “animitas” have rarely, if ever, been represented through painting in Chile.

Animitas. Roadside shrine

I am the mother of a five years old daughther, named Eloísa. Lately she has been gathering objects and material from diverse backgrounds which she ensembles, wrap, cut and paint making what she calls “materialistas”. "Materialistas" are fascinating assembladges of objects because their existance obbey to that unique ability that children have to see the world from astonishment. I see the "materialistas" as a system of work that artists and children share, a kind of game that is to face the world from observation, with the desire to explore and get new articulations and interpretations. Therefore, I used these "materialistas" in my work by representing them in photographs, paintings and videos.

Mara Santibanez