María Jose Arenas

"And it was so body that it was pure spirit"
Clarice Lispector
My works go to meet the body, where my soul is, it has always been my search; mystery and fire in the female universe. Lovers of their nature, women carry as many secrets as they are beautiful in our skin and if we enter the unknown, in its enigma as a vital knot for creation, we will coincide in the orbital landscape of its interior. I celebrate the animality and its electrifying eroticism. The expectant body suspended in the image of dance pulses as a starting point in my pictorial search, crossed, mixed by different stimuli that have been constantly in my original academic training, which is the Theater. Sketches as visual scripts for future stage works. Visual dramaturgy that begins on the canvas. I was born in Santiago de Chile. Since I was little I connected with nature and dance in their communion, an experience that led me to drawing. I contemplate a "stage space" type workshop where the body enters its natural wisdom, in the rhythmic order of dance. From there I open those opening channels recognizing the traces that the body leaves in its movement, a magical act that brings to my eyes the inner Sacred Geometry.

In my theater studies, I got to know the butoh dance (dance created in postwar Japan); It was there where I connected with the union between dance and painting; the body mingled into space in a "silent scream" through his pulse that beat from his own wounded interior. In turn, the space (the canvas) seemed to have a life of its own, it was a vibrant corrugated paper pulsed by the interpreter. They were building a three-dimensional painting, a visionary dance.
Later I studied "painting of human figures" and "still life" with private teachers; Alex Bezárez and Sergio Montero respectively (2008-2011)
and contemporary dance in different workshops. I began to experience the physical act of painting, a becoming of dance, movement as a transforming axis.

2018: Exhibition of Series of Drawings "De Geishas y Kiltros" in small format. Café Mingus Coffee. Italia neighborhood.
2017: Exhibition of Series of Drawings and Paintings "Mutatis Mutandis". Gallery Oops. Italia neighborhood.
2015:
Exhibition of Oil Paintings in Portal La Dehesa, Vitacura, Santiago.