Texts

NATURAL IMPULSE EXHIBITION
Galería Sextante, Bogotá, 2024

Ximena Velasco’s (Santiago de Chile, 1967) artistic trajectory has been marked by her foray into the ancient and mysterious codes of botany. She has ventured through diverse manifestations, linked by an expressive refinement in colorful compositions and vegetal allegories of the finest and most careful aesthetics. In this journey, she has found graphic parallels with other languages, such as biology, and with themes that have demanded attention from the visual arts, such as the climate crisis and glacier melting.

However, after a residency two summers ago in the Colombian Sierra Nevada, thanks to an invitation from Galería Sextante, the artist immersed herself in dyes, flavors, textures, and seeds, which are now emerging in her canvases as well as in her unique ceramic pieces. This entails a radical change in the artist’s creative universe: she is now instinctively combining volumetric shapes and bidimensionality. Also, in this exhibition, she has scaled down the wide range color palettes of her paintings, watercolors, collages and mixed techniques, to engage in the neutral and earthy shades of her clay sculptures. Over time, her work has undergone an internal retreat, walking slowly and steadily towards the eternal return of the purest initial inspirations. In processes that open up to the unexpected, to what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, or “the beauty of imperfection and simplicity”; the small and subtle. Indeed, processes attained after reaching the top of the tallest tree.

Marilú Ortiz de Rozas
February, 2024

FRACTAL BOTANY
Espacio Alonso, Santiago, 2022
Centro de Arte Molino Machmar, Puerto Varas, 2023

“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” William Blake

Trained at the Universidad Católica de Chile School of Art in the late eighties, Ximena Velasco is one of the most prominent and representative painters of her generation.

Early on, influenced by the teachings of masters such as Eduardo Vilches, Patricia Israel, Gonzalo Cienfuegos, Hernán Miranda, and Samy Benmayor; over the decades, this artist has skillfully embraced and developed that legacy through delicate, rigorous, and sensitive works, expressed in extremely diverse formats and techniques. In this exhibition, she shows a series of drawings and paintings created over the last four years, whose central topic appears to be the universe of plants.

Considering that 81.8% of life on our planet is plant-based, Ximena Velasco honors and salutes that hegemony through works in which her intuitive, meditative, sustained, and experimental process materializes into formally and chromatically harmonious and suggestive images.

Generosity and abundance, along with a high degree of optimism and positive energy, seem to radiate from all these recent works of the artist. In a kind of “virtuous deconstruction,” we encounter environments and scenes where the liquid and the dry, the geometric and the organic, the graphic and the pictorial, passages, and screens naturally intertwine.

These works exhibit constant dynamism, visual activity springing from a playful interaction between opaque and translucent planes, different layers and sheets that, as a chromatic change of skin, hurriedly generate virtuous chords and serene tensions, encapsulated narrow ribs, amber fossils, and interwoven textures.

While it is true that plant life is central in Ximena Velasco’s current production, it could be said that what appears in these works is not just any plant subject. These scenes are protagonized, more often than not, by small and fragile plants, devoid of deep roots; rather light structures floating suspended in an undefined, transparent space, sometimes daytime, sometimes nighttime.

Just as in Giorgio Morandi’s work, whose bottles, jars, and pots evoke human presence, in Ximena Velasco’s work, plants tend to acquire certain characteristics that could well suggest a nod to our bodies and their relationship with our environment. In other words, the language of Nature filtered through human spirituality, is clearly seen in her drawings and paintings. It is thus that her great collection of seeds, barks, leaves, petals, stems, and thorns undergoes transformation through fragmentation and superimposition, echoing the modular and divisible physiology so characteristic of plants (which is one of the main survival strategies in the plant world).

It should be noted that during the seventies and eighties, Ximena Velasco lived her childhood and youth outside of Chile. This experience of estrangement undoubtedly shaped her connection with culture and Nature in a very special way. She often recalls, with deep feeling, walking –always alone and sketchbook in hand– through the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., along the beaches of the West Coast in USA, and the semi-rural and wooded surroundings of New Haven (where humid and torrid summers, springs flooded with multicolored flowers, autumns with red-orange foliage, and winters with snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures were frequent).

Back in Chile, she studied at the Universidad Católica’s School of Art, where she absorbed the distant tradition of the more lyrical and organic line of the Bauhaus (represented in the early 20th century by creators such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, or Georg Muche); in this sense, the late works of Henri Matisse, the graphics of Jean Arp, or the studies of flowers and other plants by Max Ernst could also be considered sources of inspiration. In recent years, the influence of other notable colleagues has been added, including Hilma af Klint, Barbara Hepworth, Jennifer Bartlett, Julie Mehretu, Jorinde Voigt, and Beatriz Milhazes.

Let us receive and celebrate this “Fractal Botany” by Ximena Velasco, allowing ourselves to be carried away by its vital fields of color, which evoke a highly refined, soothing, and comforting inner nature that invites us to soak up its nutrients, expand our imagination toward the earth and air, and participate in that kind of “trance” that the artist herself seems to experience daily in her practice.

Cristián Silva,
November 2022

THAW EXHIBITION
Sala Gasco Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, 2021.

“Breaking the ice” as an act of digging a trench in silence.

Ximena Velasco breaks the ice to talk about thaw. On this occasion, her icebreaker has to do, above all, with her choosing large formats, which require a bolder commitment from the body when painting on the floor. 

From the sharp eye that governs fine motor skills, Ximena moves onto her body, a body that surrenders to the process and experiments with gouaches, drips, and transparencies. Aside from her typical fragmentation of levels, layers and layers of different depths emerge here. Seeking to decompress -both herself and the work- the artist bets on expressive power, even at the cost of losing certain degree of control. And she does so using form and process as metaphors of a global and uncontrolled phenomenon: the thawing of the deepest layers of the Earth that have been frozen for thousands of years in polar areas.

The secret narrative of this work resides on several studies on Permafrost, the structure in geological sediments overlain and accumulated through time, where the earliest layers turn into ice. These layers have accumulated organic and environmental matter for thousands of years; a cross-section will reveal the age-old history of humanity trapped therein. But for decades now, Permafrost has been melting as a result of global warming caused by excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, such as CO2. With the thawing of Permafrost, more CO2 is released, which in turn contributes to increased warming, generating a perfect vicious cycle.

Although Ximena’s work has remained true to a strictly visual thought, she has not stopped establishing intimate relationships with her physical and cultural environment. Thus, the current Covid pandemic operates as one more context that permeates through her work. Such a connection is not random. In fact, scientists have found that, especially on Russian ice caps, thawing not only releases CO2, but also viruses from remote epidemics that have been trapped in the ice, and are now becoming active again, such as the Spanish Flu.

However, beyond her scientific observations, the focus of the work is translating into images how these environmental processes visually transform the landscape.

II

Ximena’s work is obsessive in repeating patterns. They are visually consistent and recognizable: she experiments combining shapes repeatedly, as if they were numbers articulating mathematical formulas on the surface of the picture.

Her work is rooted in the codes of abstraction, unaffiliated to fashions and trends. Ximena was bound to that language as a teenager, when she used to visit the East Wing Museum in Washington, D.C., and spend the entire day contemplating -and sometimes copying in her sketchbook- her favorite works of the 20th century masters. She was particularly drawn to the American Abstract Expressionists.

Ximena was raised in the United States, and during her adolescence, attended a school of academic excellence, where art education was very important. Those were years of experimentation, euphoria, discoveries, and introspection, because she was far from her affections. However, this situation allowed her to shape her identity as an artist, not only due to her close contact with both the practice and history of art, but also because her uprooting was a space free from social conditioning. While her immediate circle was engaged caring about the world and politics, she was the child immersed in shapes and colors.

And even if her tongue got caught between two languages and her identity split between two nationalities, there was a language that brought everything together from the very beginning: the abstract images that bound together, composed and articulated, shaped her universal language.

III    

This choice for abstraction in Ximena Velasco’s work, is directly related to her interest in natural phenomena. The different levels overlapping in her paintings explore situations that take place within live surroundings: connecting micro and macro, distant and near, visible and invisible. It is a body of work that conceives Nature as a geometric model, and translates it into a personal code. When closely looking at a snowflake through a microscope, its rigorously symmetrical structure is revealed. Euclid spoke about that mathematical perfection laying out in the world with precise laws of form and combination, which Ximena interprets and reformulates in her work.

Abstraction, this way, is a code that adheres with natural honesty to the questions and issues animating it. A phenomenological rather than a discursive work –for there is no story to tell, no cause to defend, no idea to convince of– presenting itself as a complex system of interrelated forms.    

IV

Abstract language as a purely visual choice takes narrative logic into crisis in order to play a part in observing, wondering, and allowing phenomena to speak for themselves. It is a round trip between eye and intuition. The authority of reason is on hold here, hierarchies are in disarray. In Ximena Velasco’s work, multiple elements dialogue on equal terms without any of them claiming a prominent position. As in the great theater of Nature, the images are there, offering themselves to the viewer, wide open to multiple readings. 

V

The repetition of patterns found in Nature –the fractal structure– finds its way into Ximena’s work as a composition method and performative gesture. She explains that the repetitive motion of drawing leads her to a trance-like state. Once more, it is an escape, a cleansing of the mind. This state becomes embodied physically: the artist regularly runs 11 kilometers across the city, almost always on an empty stomach. This practice of running on an empty stomach, repeating leg movements, breathing rhythmically, usually precedes her arrival at her studio. When invasive thoughts are appeased, space for imagination opens up as a state of awareness and clarity. Repeating a physical movement to express repetitions in nature: Ximena is a part of her pictures.

Catalina Mena L.
English translation Martha Seelemberger

MUTATIONS EXHIBITION
Sala Gasco Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, 2013.
Stars Cast in Mutations

Ximena Velasco’s exhibition seems like a magnificent play with many scenes acted by the same actors. What changes from scene to scene are the actors’ makeup and costumes, as well as the settings.  Mutations is the name the artist has given her exhibition precisely because each and every paint stroke, object, part of her play, all inspired on the simplest elements found in Nature, attain a new visual dimension, a new presence. The main characters of this play are a rock eroded by the ocean, a magnolia pistil, an alga fragment, fruit flesh, branches, moss, tree remnants. These characters, being shy, defy identification, whether on canvas or paper. Thus, they end up forming a collective work of art, within which they have both joint and individual meanings.

This mise en scene is more clearly seen in the large format paintings, where tiny figures play main roles, becoming stars. Giants whom we see as if directly through a microscope now inhabit Lilliput. Paradoxically, the scenes of the play are written in the elegant and simple style of an ode, where the strength comes from a mournful simplification of its values, rather than the use of grandiloquent terms.

All elements in Mutations fuse together into a dreamlike, abstract atmosphere with delicate colors and composition. There is certain playfulness in the ambivalence of the shapes oscillating between representation and abstraction. In her work, the artist purports finding Man’s essence through his morphological make-up.

Ximena Velasco (a graduate from the Escuela de Arte de la Universidad Católica – where she was influenced by Patricia Israel, and a former student at several art schools in Italy and the United States) is clearly fascinated with Nature’s aesthetics, especially botany’s graphic universe, fascination that permeates her art. At the end of the 1980’s, in Washington, D.C., she was touched by an erotically charged Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography exhibition of black and white calla lilies. Years later, in 2004, she started working with plants and flowers for her Botanika exhibition.

She has also been inspired by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy’s outdoor installations created with random elements found in nature, Creation’s residues coming alive in his outstanding work.

Until a few years ago, she had utilized this type of objects in her paintings, but since attending the New York’s School of Visual Arts residency program in 2011 where she re-connected with manual work, she started incorporating collage and drawing to her paintings. Ximena Velasco never stops experimenting, and in this Sala Gasco exhibition -her eighth solo- she even utilizes images of brain blood vessels, which she sees as a reflection of trees’ roots and manually transfers on paper or canvas.

This convergence of human and land figures is depicted in eight large paintings, and ten small works done on paper. She avoids naming her pictures to prevent creating semantic confusion with new Mutations or even Metamorphosis –the name of her prior exhibition- in the minds of her public. And, because within a view of the world equating the animal and human kingdoms, heaven and Earth, where everything mutates, changes, transforms, anyone could undergo the experience of the main character in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Marilú Ortiz de Rozas
Translation Ana Maria Velasco