The Wandering Eye, an Abstract and Alchemical Journey at Ambar Quijano

Galería Ambar Quijano presents Painting as Medium: an Alchemy of Image and Matter, featuring the work of Juana Subercaseaux, Meryl Yana, Isabella Russo Siqueira, Andrea Bores Chemor, Mariana Paniagua, and Sandra Leal. The exhibition, which wagers on painting as a space of transformation and a center of alchemy, prompts us to ask: where does the eye come to rest? What does it cling to when faced with an abstract image?

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There is no grid, no scaffolding, no rest before the liquid structure. The eye is forced to embark on a journey: it searches, without knowing what it searches for, yet without pause. The limit as a place of respite. The banks of a river where sediment gathers, while at the center the whirlpool takes place. In that tumult, pale blues turn into greens inside a yellow cavern, with flashes that grow ever warmer, gray themselves, and redden at the margins¹. As soon as the first image ends, the adventure begins.

The eye travels from canvas to canvas, finding in each a new form of abyss. An accumulated abstraction that moves through this space like a slow blaze, a whisper, a scream, or the roar of a dead volcano². We enter the space of these paintings as one might open a body in half with a sharp, precise cut. Inside, all the organs appear jumbled among liquid images that burst forth and spill in serpentine forms. An image—whose candy-like intestines seem to radiate their own light, caramel colors, mints, lilacs, and pinks churning with purples and deep reds³—bounces within an immense visual territory where yet more organs pile up, fetid, rotting among yellows and oranges that, tinged green, swarm and fuse⁴.

The bewildered eye seeks a lullaby and hides in the depths of an extinguished chimney whose interior bears witness to all the fires that burned before. Suddenly, a flash in a dense purple sea⁵ pulls us back to turbulent waters, so penetrating that they reflect the outer space. The eye looks through a telescope, grows dizzy among pale blues and gray universes. Is it the moon that appears between the folds of the water? Or a hurricane of shadows and black craters?⁶ It is the earth, the encounter, the caverns covered in desires and stories, the remains of a bonfire where—all the voices now gone—told the stories of those who came before⁷.

The disoriented eye falls into a sea of warm sugar. A trap made of vertebrae leaves it just a few centimeters from the floor⁸. Sticky, it emerges once more, only to fall again before the violent blotches of yellows, carmines, and blues blackened by the soot of the bonfire that continues to burn⁹. It flees from the screech of metal against the teeth of a disjointed jaw. Shattered into a thousand pieces, the kaleidoscope-eye blinks. From the depths it glimpses some flickering lights, among which it discerns perhaps a garden, perhaps a flower that smells of ash¹⁰. Recovered yet fragmented, the eye manages to escape through the pulsing yellow heart between two petals of fire¹¹.

Without rest, it lands, bounces, and descends through turbulences, flows, and sediments that do not allow it to leave, but instead force it to circle the canvases’ edges until one gives way and allows it to return, to be dazzled once again by the sun entering through the trees outside the window.

We pull the thread and tug the eye hard. It has remained so long in the saline solution that it has turned into crystal. We pull it carefully. Fragile and ephemeral, the crystal-eye—soaked in a dense mixture of paint and abstraction—has become a shining treasure. What spirits will these surfaces continue to summon in a thunderous and silent duel with color?

— Carolina Magis Weinberg

Translated to English by Luis Sokol

1 Mariana Paniagua, Vientre caliente.

2 Mariana Paniagua, Crecimiento.

3 Juana Subercaseaux, El proceso de convertirse en golosina.

4 Juana Subercaseaux, The accident.

5 Andrea Bores, AGUANTAR EL ALIENTO SOSTIENE EL HORIZONTE.

6 Andrea Bores, TEMPESTAD II.

7 Andrea Bores, LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS.

8 Meryl Yana, Shadow Faced, Bending the Order of Flesh.

9 Sandra Leal, La caída (The Fall).

10 Isabella Russo Siqueira, Circuits of Renewal.

11 Juana Subercaseaux, Placeres flácidos.