STATEMENT

When I look at my paintings, I recognize the traces of the petite dramas of their making.

I see all their elements: The expressive use of paint, the erasing of paint with paint, the figures, the writing and the abstraction eating them like The Nothingness eats Fantasia in The Neverending Story (1984). The whole lot of it, as the laid out process of a guy that tries to paint something affirmative with a brush made of doubts; as if the process of composing a satire was a satire of itself. I think this addresses the oxymoron that contemporary painting can be; where all style is both available and historically empty.

These paintings need to be represented, believed in, loved and shown, because they are truthful to the fragile condition of being an artist today and if you dig into each one of them there's an idea, an ethos, a void to fulfill. Not something to show off or be cool or trendy about. These paintings might be built on the painterly scars of their own mistakes and tribulations, but their insistence builds them up into affirmation of the contemporary condition. And the drama, the satire, the mirror, are not aimed as the resulting image to make, but they are the process itself, in that sense these paintings don't lure your affection they don't sell you anything, but are composed of that affective process, and I think that's worth it.

BIO

Rafael Yaluff was born in Santiago de Chile in 1983, soon after he moved to Africa with his father who was an Ivory tradesman, where he often shared his space with wild animals, and made friends with the royal families of the different tribes. He studied african Philosophy in Congo, but had to interrupt his early studies in the the Theory of Honesty with professor Ubunto Obonta. To move to Chile with his Father and rejoin his brother and mother who he had hardly met, now that dictatorship was over and could joint the Communist revolution once again. His Mother had been a disciple of Kazimir Malévich and she introduced him to the conceptual painting scene that was arrising in the chilean underground. Whith this training in mind he moved again to the wild to Chilean Patagonia where he began his first paintings: massive scale, plain air depictions of the remote rainforests of Chilean Patagonia. At the culmination of this project, he moved back to Santiago but everyone was gone. then he had to change his name, forget he ever was Rafael and become Xotlz Popov. He then engaged in a deconstructive approach of painting, employing different painting styles, as an attempt to demystify taste in painting and advancing towards a rarefication of pictorial language, as both a way to respond to the hegemonic format derived from the relationship between taste and trade, and delve into poetry and the possibilities within its gratuity. After living most of his life in Congo, and Chilean Patagonia he visited Berlin and then moved to NYC. right now his location is unknown, but thought to be somewhere in Septmeriodional tropic.