Gastón Orellana

GASTÓN ORELLANA (Chile, 1993).
No title.
Serigraph on Japanese paper, copy 158/300.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 50 x 70 cm.
Born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1933, son of an Andalusian mother and an Extremaduran father from a family of the old Extremaduran aristocracy, from Trujillo. Between 1959 and the mid-sixties, when Orellana reached maturity as a painter, the first generation of his art was identified. In Madrid, together with the artists of the Hondo group, he promoted the "new figuration", and painted at the confluence of informal abstraction with the mannerism of an existential figuration that others called mystical. For the artist it is a time of amalgamations, producing rebellious and almost extravagant images. It was in New York, in the pictorial tribalism of this city that the painter achieved success, first in the sphere of the avant-garde, already established, already classical, managed by Martha Jackson, thanks to the balanced beauty of his paintings, to his European canon. In the mid-seventies, Orellana broke with old balances and measured himself against the collage of different styles developed in the United States. In the eighties, between Italy and New York, far from being exhausted, his wave is still full. With the cycle of paintings entitled "Bronx" Orellana penetrates to the centre of his work: he builds it with a conceptual foundation. Nascent concepts begin to come into play that would, by the nineties, come to full life: the fruits of the long Andean archaeological journey that took him to Peru, Bolivia and Argentina in 1958; and an intractable but ever-present musicality, as the Italian critic Tommaso Trini wrote, and finally graphite on oil: the eternal lesson of archaeological ceramics, more vital in its reflection of the embodied and modern gesturality that gives an account of that exceptional "élan" (in the words of James Johnson Sweeney) that characterises his work.In his most recent exhibitions (Milan, Taipei, Cáceres) we discover in him an artist in full creative maturity in a line that is already far removed from those neo-figurative origins. Widely recognised internationally, the most important of his works to date, "The Burning Train" (New York 1960) is in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. Orellana participated in the Spanish pavilion at the XXXV Venice Biennale in 1970. An important and valuable triplicate of his, "Crucifixion" (New York, 1960s) is part of the Vatican's Contemporary Art collection. In 2005, his work, entitled "The Scarlet Bed", 1967, took part in the prestigious exhibition "Il Male", held in Turin, which included works by the most important masters from the 19th century to the present day.