Solange Escosteguy

Solange Escosteguy (presentation of her show Silence Zones - Santiago, 1995)

"Silence Zones" brings together objects and sculptures made in the last two years. These are works that clearly mark a new phase, centered in the use of paper mach‚ and collages. The form, the volume, and the movement detach themselves from the paper and complement each other with other elements that I add, such as pieces of wood, cloth, illustrations, and photographs. For the first time immediate references to the reality around us appear, although by no means may we speak of a conversion to the figurative.
Color is still the channel to the exploration of the nature of things. It gives the rhythm and the life to the forms of the works. It wouldn't be hard to possibly recognize in the Silence Zones reflections of the colors of the Andes Mountains, the earth, and the forests of Chile.
But there is a fundamental difference in relation to earlier works that isn't found in the colors, the technique or the materials. It is in the creative process. I molded these works of mixed techniques on paper mach‚ based on observations, memories, photographs of landscapes, and people I met, lost, and found throughout life. It's a process in reverse. An investigation of sediments, layers, and scars. The reverse of birth.
That might also help explain the Silence Zones. They are landscapes, scenes, silent and imprisoned sensations that the perception investigates and explores, layer by layer. They are at the same time memory and forgetfulness. Encounters and departures. A little of what inspires the contemplation of the monumental mountains, the glaciers, and the sea. From this investigation of oneself, our individuality, and the landscapes inside us. Here, more important than the vision is the perception.

Hélio Oiticica ("The Creations of Solange Escosteguy"- 1967)

The notion of refinement that designers attach to feminine clothes in general derives from the price or the luxury of the materials they use and which make the clothes more or less expensive. For Solange Escosteguy however, the idea of refinement is not necessarily linked to the price of the material but to her visual ideas of drawing and color. Solange doesn't allow herself to get carried away with excesses, by the application of ornaments over the idea, but wants the form itself, the general cut of each outfit, to be brought to life from only one idea, which extends itself throughout the entire outfit completing itself with the continuous drawing and the color, always very visual. This comes from an innate drawing gift in the artist, which develops itself in each new outfit with a huge inventive abundance. The forms evolve continuously, they wrap evenly around the whole outfit, that is when the most unexpected semblances appear. They are like vegetable forms coming from the heart of nature, as if they had been suggested by tropical vegetation, sometimes loaded with vital experiences which lend them a strange and at times uncommon nature- this, however, in a very subtle way. Solange is truly and above all a painter. That is why her visual conceptions come afloat filled with subjectivism but always translated into visual ideas, in line, form, and color. When she created in 1966 her first objects, which I name "anti-boxes" and "supra- relieves", there was no break or discontinuity between the two activities. She goes from one to the other, as if this enriched and gave space to her unrestrained desire to express herself in color and form that arise in new proposals in each new work. In the outfits she gives form to an innate decorative sense, of a Matissean clarity, of a sound and impressive visuality: the color, decorative, vibrates at times in silent tones but always of an interior nature, which adds itself to the vibration which the color had at its origin. When she creates her first relieves or "supra- relieves" they are like extensions of her first activity- she attempts to put into a purely plastic structure her previous ideas which flow organically as a vital need. She goes straight to the box relief and from the very the very first one the form which was then of a trapezoid was virtually dismantled by the strength of the color form which wrapped it. That's how the concept I named "supra- relief" or "anti- box" was born: this continuous rupture, construction and reconstruction of volumes by the color form was continuously painted over the surface transforming it topologically. The box here is relief but is no longer the box form because the artist is not concerned with working on the constructive idea in the box or in its shape, but she wants with this to create an ambivalence between color, form, and space, and the box form or relief where vision may flow continuously in it, out of it, behind it, and in front of it. For that she uses color in all its vibrations in a highly decorative form where we can see all her joy in creating, which is, in my view, the most important trait in her attitude facing the creative demands. She reminds me sometimes of Sophie Tauber- Arp, but what is idealism in the Swiss painter is in Solange with her inevitable tropicalism, an availability to create which flows from inside and transforms itself into strange outfits, into unexpected relieves, into a really fascinating geometry.

Solange Escosteguy

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