Why insist on painting?
On the successive declarations of death of this genre, a force still lives, a variation, a fold that does not stop appearing in the course of time. A capturing force that updates it and puts it back into circulation. No other genre lives so intensely on its own death cycle like painting. To extract from it, that variation, that fold; it can be a challenge with which to try to measure Matías Solar's paintings; think from them, the encounter between the dissolution of history and the technological acceleration of the media; the programming and control in the body of a new pictorial surface.
More than representing, the paintings operate here as capture planes; absorption meshes that, through their folds, make visible the synthesis of a life understood from the territory, geography and the history of certain representation techniques. Extreme logics are combined to give meaning to a transformation of the pictorial: thermal models of information transfer from the landscape and the socially precarious resources of the supports. Thus, the objectual themes of representation have been dissolved in a translation process that makes a language of abstraction and automatism emerge. All the expressive force of the paintings occurs in the decoding of the information, they become unrecognizable because they assume another skin, another layer, another way of conceiving the pictorial outside the disciplined body of representation.
Large-format canvases and paintings not only no longer represent something, but are the material process of alteration –even destruction– of the habitual codes by which we measure painting. For this reason, the fold is the only thing that remains standing in the painting, it is already its mechanical and automatic process of survival, the place of appointment with the historical reference of the painting, but also its reverse and connection with the new techniques of visual production.
II
In all contemporary painting there is a microphysical struggle within the pictorial space; a struggle that has been banishing the metaphysical corpus that animated the story and organized the human bodies within it. As a result of this process, Matías's works have unstructured the story and the body, introducing them into the matter of a flow that results in a screen-image. As if all the things that make up the material world returned to their organic state and prior to any representation. Prior to the forms, identification and recognition, these pieces seduce because they capture the intensity of a material event in the volumes and print. They make bubbles and strings live in the very flatness of the surface. The high chromatic contrast produces the vibration of the waves, giving the clothes a movement that is no longer narrative, but chemical and physical.
Construction procedures are installed between the limits of etching and painting. The high-tech effect is caused by a careful chromatic system that floods the extension of each satin fabric trim. Here, without reservation, the exhibition of the precarious economy of materials and ad-hoc techniques of a system come to the fore, a system in which the corporality of the artist is required organically and in a performative way. The use of low-cost fabrics and spray cans, that is, the genealogy of resources already shows the political sense of production: its popular and regional aspect. They infiltrate the sacred body of the painting and turn it into something else; that is, they give it another body that no longer fits into the patterns of its old definitions.
III
What kind of body pesters in these paintings?
There is no longer flesh or body, only flow and technological figures. These paintings have been woven from a world displayed by information technologies and readings of a landscape that no longer recognizes the human scale, but rather the infra and macro of image production systems. His visual construction models no longer follow the anatomical pattern of anything similar or recognizable. The chromatic effect is the very embodiment of the frames and figures that describe a world subsumed by infinite processes of circulating information. That body that haunts is the own subjectivity hatched by the systems of control and identification. The morphology of a new figuration that can no longer ignore the expanded screen on which the world of visuality moves.
This intensity of the subjective plot is the one that expands, fold by fold, in Matías's works. To take out of painting a new form of expression to make it flow outside the frames of recognition and, fundamentally, to take painting away from the critical autism that has separated it from experimentation. It insists on altering the languages, to leave on the scene the testimony of new movements within the surface: undoing the visible and the legible. The physical gravity of control and the fluidity of the means of control –suspended– in an unrecognizable image of the pictorial experience.
— César E. Vargas
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