Lo que vi, Chile 1973–2019
The Invisible Dog is pleased to present Lo que vi, a new work by artist Paz Corona, who has been living in Paris since 1973. Corona’s exhibition, which includes three films and a ceramic installation, is “a device for thinking.”
It echoes the gift that Claude Monet offered France after the end of the first world war: the 22 oil painting panels which make up the Water Lilies. He requested them to be on permanent viewing at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The paintings are displayed all over in two contiguous oval rooms symbolizing the sign of the infinite.
Corona bridges this story with the one of Chile, her home country, where she has produced some of the pieces on display in the gallery.
The first film takes place in Atacama, one of the driest deserts in the world, in northern Chile, where many people who disappeared during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet were buried anonymously. This infinite shaped performance poetically restores the existence of those who were denied an identity. The infinity sign appearing in this work also evokes the Moebius band, an object where upward and downward, inside and outside melt which urges the viewer to consider the way the truth has been twisted in recent news and political events particularly in Chile.
The second film is the image of a tree that has left a hole when falling down. With this gesture, the 0 (the hole) and the 1 (the tree) force us to consider how, when we fail to acknowledge the missing, we deny everyone’s existence. In other words, without the zero—the lack—it is impossible to count one by one. The power of this film lies in its simplicity, reducing the visual effect to what the camera offers: a fixed shot of a moving image, a logic symbol.
By a similar logic, the third film evokes this same notion: how the accumulation of “ones” produces a human Tsunami.
Lastly, throughout the gallery, the artist has placed ceramic flowers that link the different pieces—not only to each other, but to each visitor’s own body. Placed on the ground in a seemingly random way, they must be circumvented in order to explore the room. This creates a theater scene where our own bodies in movement, one by one, become the actors.
About Paz Corona
Artist and also psychoanalyst, she is member of the School of the Freudian cause and the world association of psychoanalysis. In 2015, she presents Face to Face at the Alliance Française of Delhi and the Harrington Street Arts Center in Calcutta (India). She was part of Le temps de l’audace et de l’engagement, a collective exhibition at the IAC in Villeurbanne (France) and in Sèvres Outdoor at the Jardin de la Manufacture in Sèvres (France) in 2016. In 2017, she had a solo show at gallery Les filles du Calvaire. Her works are regularly presented at international fairs.
Paz Corona was born in Santiago, Chile in 1968. She lives and works in Paris, France. She is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire.
Website: www.pazcorona.com
Instagram: @paz_corona_paris
