Carlos Bautista Biernnay (Chile, 1969-.)

“Beauty, if not an answer, is a consolation”  

My artistic production emerges from my individual vision of reality, a vision with which I operate from the conceptual ironies created from the investigation of the environments in which I am immersed, from which I appropriate and alter visual elements known to all, such as icons from mass culture, religions, references to art history, elements of nature or individual and collective memory. All of them are linked to me, since all of them, as affecting facts, are a significant part of my individuality and subjectivity.   

I use a great accumulation of visual materials, significant, dissimilar, with which I build the various cosmoses expressed within my body of work within a material and narrative baroque manifested in the use of textiles as media, away from the traditional materials of art. Cosmoses in which the dialogues between the profane, the pagan, the secular, the intimate, and the individual adjust themselves to the hybridity of their nonhierarchical locations.  

Textiles function in my work as an impulse to conciliate the eclectic, that which is mixed, the limitless, with the intention of recovering the continuously shifting memory closely related to the work and the traditionally feminine labors linked to history, both individual and collective.  

A legacy, the textile one, and its elaboration, shared by all, in which realism, a sort of abstraction, the allusion to the fine and decorative arts are integrated, all of this with the intention of creating close visual narratives, because it is in the legacy and in its inevitable memory where I take a position as a researcher of media and materials, of fabrics and textiles, of which I make use in their capacity, malleability, and combinatory versatility in terms of color and textures.   

My purpose as an artist is to generate meaning at the moment of taking possession of memories and rescuing them. Those memories, which are the true images of past and present times, which pass quickly and can only be retained at the moment when they emerge in the union of fabrics and textiles in their new narrative harmony.  

Hence my predilection for making quilts as the main space for the unfolding of my narratives. In them I empty collages, combined textiles, embroideries, drawings and paintings, as strategies or means of expression relevant to achieve the juxtaposition and de-hierarchization of the elements from the reality that surrounds me and in which I find myself immersed, besides being a place of tradition and visuality close to the viewers.   

My bodies of work have been nourished by a diversity of artistic trends and by existence, a legacy ranging from art legitimized as Dadaism in its taste for the intelligent absurd, coupled with my family experience, surrounded by women who sewed daily as a means of subsistence.  

Both emerge in my individual and particular plastic and visual language, which has opted for a special absurdity rooted in the vindication of an artisticity that claims for life. A claim for life in its exuberance, in its random and entropic possibility, in that energy which is retained in memory, which should not be lost, and which usually appears exposed in its totality in my work.