From the South of the World: A Gesture of Imagination and Resistance
To highlight the strength of a generation expanding the boundaries of Latin American figuration, Isabel Croxatto Galería presents at Art Toronto 2025 the works of three Chilean artists: Paloma Castillo, Joaquín Reyes, and Rolankay. Through hand embroidery and painting, respectively, each of them challenges the classical representation of the body and visual narrative. They explore symbolic and emotional dimensions deeply rooted in the Latin American context, where memory, identity, and social tensions inform their aesthetic pursuit.
Paloma Castillo, known for her exploration of embroidery as a conceptual and political language, presents Bellum, a series of six pieces that reclaim the textile gesture as a critical tool against the violence and absurdity of war. The artist contrasts the slowness, fragility, and intimacy of thread with the dizzying spectacle of contemporary conflict, turning fabric into a space of poetic resistance.
Joaquín Reyes situates mystery at the core of his painting. His figures—solitary or gathered in silent crowds—inhabit scenes that evoke rituals suspended between the real and the imaginary. Deeply engaged with color, form, and the physicality of the pictorial process, he develops a language where narrative yields to construction, generating a sense of estrangement that destabilizes ordinary logic.
Rolankay, in his new series Light and Concealment, inhabits a world where light is not merely an optical phenomenon but a space of revelation and loss. Clarity never presents itself as a definitive state: it illuminates and conceals simultaneously, opening vision even as it interrupts it. His pictorial gesture unfolds within that tension, articulating the figurative and the abstract, portrait and landscape, as dimensions that contaminate one another, composing a poetic universe where painting sustains the restlessness of the gaze.
With the support of the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage of Chile, Isabel Croxatto Galería reaffirms its commitment to the international promotion of visual arts from the Global South, emphasizing the versatility and depth of new Latin American figuration.
Toronto, October 2025