Pablo Riestra

I studied contemporary art in Santiago, Chile; otherwise I am an autodidact artist. I spent all of my childhood in Santiago de Chile; my adult life has been torn between Finland and Chile. I currently live and work in the Helsinki metropolitan area, in Finland.

What is the meaning of painting?
To me painting has become a way of time traveling, forth and back. As society goes fast and blindly forward, through each layer of oil color I go back on my path to rethink what I’ve done. This is a space to analyze the time being and to see through every week of drying a possibility to balance through each touch what is going on within me and my paintings.

Because of these six years of painting, because of this exercise of temporary movement, I got to confront and heal the child and teenager I was during the dictatorship in Chile and my later life in Finland. Now I can appreciate the present through my singularity and through my otherness.

In a world where images overwhelm and saturate the screens I use what is left, what seems insignificant, what is transmitted without any sense of belonging through the Internet, applications and social media. In a world where images are rapidly worn off, I capture what appears to be alive with my cellphone: from paintings I see during a visit to museums and galleries, random magazines at offices and receptions, reading a novel at a café, the shape and shine of a tree in a park or the heathers I keep in my balcony during winter time.

Through this exercise of surfaces and capture I return a meaning to the images. I’m specially drawn by their formal aspects: hues, materials, shapes in portraits and landscape, as well as those subtle details eluding the gaze of the unaware; simple matters of Nature like the strange and long stem of a flower. I translate them by using an intense palette of oils and acrylics; by disproportions in some shapes and flattening and elevation of certain volumes, emphasizing shadows and lights. My brush-strokes are on the thick side and also clear; there is where I am, then is when I am present. I conduct a constantly changing translation which has been a mark in my life and still is.

From that talking, writing, observing and painting otherness. When I meet people in this continent I experience a lot of misunderstanding and less concord; I find myself trying to understand the northern hemisphere and me as a part of it. I disappear under the next layer of color. I merge with the shadow I paint which appears under the spoon on the set table in my mother’s apartment; I merge with the veins in the leaf of an Anthurium painted with oil colors drying on the easel on a rainy day, here in the capital of Finland; reminding me of the central coast of Chile where my grandmother had her cottage and it ́s backyard which was always calm, green and full of bright coloured flowers during the summer time. There is where I am, then is when I am present again.
April 2025