| At 27, Ciro Beltrán has achieved a justified position of prominence
among a group of talented young Chilean artists now in their late twenties
and thirties. Among them, Beltrán has shown a particularly solid
development since his first individual exhibition in Vancouver in 1985,
and on through his already numerous individual and collective exhibitions
in the United States, Canada, Japan, Europe, Chile and other Lation American
countries. His exceptional devotion to a logical trajectory, building on
what came before and going beyond, is evident in his current untitled exhibit
of 30 new works at Praxis Santiago.
Beltran's art is deeply spiritual, even mystical, eliciting a contemplative response in the viewer. The artist continues to be preoccupied with ecology and world peace, expressing a deeply felt moral sense about these issues. Without being descriptive, his work is symbolic of them - the sacred immanent in the physical world - using a vocabulary of recurrent symbolism to express this underlying theme. Since his exhibit De Los Cursos del Agua (1989, Galería Espaciocal, Santiago), his central metaphor has been water as source of spirit and life. In the present exhibition, these references, reinforced by poetic titles such as "El Pez Templo y el Acuario", are linked to a newly elaborated vocabulary of architectonic forms, at once suggesting temples or other monumental structures floating, as ships, perhaps, though watery space. (1). Even when the titles do not refer specifically to this iconography (as in "La Silla Roja") visual continuity with it usually remaings. The architectonic forms, at times suggestive of Gothic cathedrals, Greek and Roman buildings, or ancient monoliths of various cultures, are drawn over the thickly painted surfaces of his canvases in such a way that the underlying abstract color composition appears determined by the drawing that it will eventually support. This enables Beltrán to achieve a surprising sense of depth and of mobile spaces, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of the surface. Painted in acrylic mixed with sand and earth materials, these surfaces are usually built up to high relief that effectively catches the ambient light, often glowing with a kind of metallic sheen. True to Beltrán's methodological bent, the coloration of these works is keyed to his application of Goethe's color theory. Here yellow is light, blue is shadow; both moving toward red which is their dialectical culmination. Beltrán is also attracted to the moral values assigned to colors by Goethe, as he puts it, "beyond the simple utility of the theree primaries of Newton". Thus, the moral /religious dimension of his work is also imbedded in the mysterious relations of colors, expressing within themselves a veiled reference to universal laws. One is reminded of the words of Goethe's disciple, F. Hebbel : "Every genuine work of art is mysterious, ambiguous, unfathomable symbol..."(2). Also in the Praxis show are a group of whant the artist calls "catalogue paintings". In these the field is divided into eight compartments, each of which contains a motif from one of his recent paintings. While the procedure gives the artist an opportunity to conceptualize and unify his visual metaphors, their inclusion in the show serves to underline the seriousness with which he views this kind of self-evaluation. With some trepidation, one might say that the combination of German philosophy and Latin spirituality and the thematic concerns one sees in this work is quintessentially Chilean, although, by the same token, there is absolutely nothing provincial about it. Beltrán's painting breaks through the satandard Chilean mythology of isolation, while betraying a profound attachment to his origins. Claudia Rousseau
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