Dignified Beauty by Ángelo Álvarez

The word “dignity” reverberates through that great geographical corridor that forms the territory of Chile. The events of October 2019 led thousands of people to the streets to demand something that appeared in the great historical aspirations related to the field of human rights. Dignity? A very big word, loaded with intentions to demand the minimum. Suddenly, turned into a formula to fight social degradation, it is a square in the center of the capital from where people fight to recover the value of life outside the system structured by the market. We do not know how history texts will reflect it, but since that month of October, an important part of the country’s population has dedicated itself, precisely, to give it weight and renewing the depth of a term so recurrent that it seemed to have lost its dignity.

In Ángelo Álvarez ‘s work, this is expressed as a form of resistance. In order to escape from the beauty imposed by the bags of taste, his work adopts a basic support: cardboard. The same boxes that contain and distribute consumer goods, something like the skin of consumption, allow Angelo to reclaim a space of access to another pictorial conception of the portrait. To the use of this nonnoble material are added the prints of a series of people lacking social notoriety outside their towns and street protests. It is from there that this effort to resist the aesthetics that marks a difference between those who are worthy of being represented and those who are not is articulated.

In these cardboard paintings, so to speak, dignified beauty emerges from the resistance to the codes of conventional aesthetics: the improper material and the unpresentable people appear here in a silent protest, a social vindication that is resolved with a realistic and colorful stroke. The technical mastery and the eloquent brushstroke speak of a painter of enormous perception and expressiveness. In his works scattered on the walls of the Casa Azul Cultural Center appears the humility of a social origin denied under a form that we can consider costumbrist. It is not a question, however, of making those people marked by the dispossession of dignity appear as ancient nobles or monarchs. In Dignified Beauty there is no exhibitionism or paternalism: they are only faces of the popular world that the painter has gathered with sufficient mastery to remind us of their shocking and completely fleeting presence. To quote Pedro Lemebel, “the human X-ray of that malnourished landscape” of poverty is well fixed on the cardboard where the precariousness of the medium is recognized, without renouncing the desire to perpetuate the image against oblivion.

We know that the use of painting as a dignifying form is not a new aspiration, nor is the adoption of a popular space in contrast to the white cube of a traditional room. Dignified Beauty was exhibited at the Casa Azul Cultural Center, a mixture of domestic space, workshop, patio of night lights and barbecues, laboratory and home. All this without appealing to any kind of exclusivity. We will have to think then that the dignity of this house reconverted into a space of the SACO Biennial circuit is an example of resistance capable of gathering faces without history, painting without canvas, exhibition without gallery. All subtractions here add up.