STATEMENT
I make drawings, paintings and sculptures, to attempt an accurate description for an inaccurate experience.
In each one of my projects I get involved with an abstract narrative, abstract in the sense that I’s not necessarily coherent, but non the less expressive and dramatic. I often draw on the satirical to build up a set of works that purpose a divergent look into granted beliefs: Weather it is our own rightfulness, empathy, truth, fragility, intimacy, desire, ecstasy, family, class, politics, nation, flag.
In that sense I work with irony, finding honesty in staying in touch with the reverse of the visible surface; what’s concealed in plain sight, both a source of comedy and tragedy.
As a Chilean born in the 80’s, I’m a child of the dictatorship, perhaps none of us tolerate authority very well, but we also come from an internalized authoritarian upbringing, a kind of double binding disposition. Therefore, the importance of poetry in Chile, both as tradition and break with tradition (poem and anti-poem), is an inspiration to work through canonical mediums such as painting, dealing with conservatism and its symbiotic relation with the avant-garde.
I hope my work dwells in a space opposite to the one mandated by the social media, and invites the viewer for a moment in a more fragile format, exercising soft power over an ever more self-endorsing cultural environment.
Are my paintings useful? Maybe only if they are able to hang on invisible walls.
BIO
Rafael Yaluff was born in Santiago de Chile in 1983. As a philosophy student, he started painting landscapes in Chilean Patagonia investigating phenomenology and impressionism. After these initial years of working in isolation he began a nomadic life that took him to Germany, Toronto, Portugal and the United States, where he recently graduated from the MFA in studio art program at Hunter College. He currently lives and works in New York City