Carlos Chacin Art

LLEJOS se ESCUCHA By Piedad Casas

Curator

 

 

In Carlos Chacin's work there is an aesthetic force born from the very roots of his land, his birthplace. Santa Marta is that city on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia, where almost magically and poetically a unique ecosystem in which the Caribbean Sea borders the Sierra Nevada, with an ethnic and cultural diversity where Arhuacos, Kogis, Sankás, blacks, mulattos, mestizos and whites cohabit within the framework of a prehistory and social, political and cultural history of multiple meanings not only within the country context, but for America and the world. 

 

I do not doubt in thinking that all these factors have activated Chacin's creative experience with his particular sense of aesthetics and being an artist committed to the society of his time that seeks to communicate his own expression of the circumstances he has lived.

 

His installations are born with the most basic materials, there are no formal or technical exaggerations. With an intentional austerity he chooses barbed wire, wood, clay, fabrics, old suitcases and complements it with his drawings on canvas. In this way he manages to construct a language in which each element fulfills the role of symbol and sign of the concept he wants to transmit and integrate into museum atmospheres. In the world he builds, the public is invaded by a visual sonority.

 

The megaphones, artifacts in clay cloth with barbed wire sticking out, piercing wire sounds that visually reinforce the voice that wants to be heard at a great distance, are suspended and linked to each other by a knotted cloth with a cracked texture in clay and tied to an old suitcase. Interesting metaphor of the social fabric and its problems. We are all there, those who left voluntarily, those who are forced to leave, those who do not return, those who are lost, everything is tension between distant points.

 

Chacin manages, by means of contrasts, to visually emphasize the aesthetic proposal and to make evident, for the interpretation of the work, the harshness of the concept of EXILE. If exile is separation from a distant or remote place, the work of Carlos Chacin is closeness, it is possibility, it is hope, it is a vote of confidence in the reconstruction of the social fabric and in the artist of the XXI century as an attentive ear that finds meaning in transmitting.

 

Piedad Casas

Far Away You Listen 2010

Curator.

 

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