María Chillón (Ourense, 1982)
I am a Spanish artist but since 2008 I work mainly in France in printmaking and drawing. I discovered printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, thanks to an Erasmus grant during my studies in Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca (Spain). In 2008 I obtained a DEA in Drawing and Engraving at the Complutense University of Madrid and then I moved to France where I really started my professional career. I participated in numerous group and individual exhibitions in Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Japan, Argentina, China, Australia, etc.
I try to grasp the meaning of being alive, I want to catch an instant of life, to freeze it, to make it visible and then apprehend its mystery. I discover myself, as a living entity among all the living forms by creating images that, without being really figurative, could be part of possible worlds by their organic, animal or plant appearance. I create a parallel inner universe to get lost into, to catch the present moment in a faster and faster world to allow us to stop and think about the value of the living.
I am very interested in the arbitrariness/capriciousness and necessity of the living forms and in how life can be so strong and fragile at the same time. My goal is not to represent reality but to create volumes that reveal an ambiguous world, a herbarium/bestiary in which the tensions between the perceptions of my body and those of my mind confront each other.
In my drawins and engravings I often follow the shadows of vegetation to compose images that, even if they are realised with the actual shapes of small plants, transform into an abstract landscape that can evoke several living things at the same time.
As the daughter of the potter of Corinth traces the outline of her lover before his departure in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, I try to capture a moment of inconstant life; but, almost without wanting to, the shadows become ambiguous spots that the spectator’s eyes mould into vegetal, animal or human forms. The “real” shadows projected on the paper, restless by the constant changes of light and the movements of the plant, as the drawing progress, make appear unknown creatures to unveil hidden feelings and perceptions. The plant becomes a giant, the image becomes the shadow of a different world; it reveals an imaginary interior world where we can think about the idea of the living to contact with the reality and catch the present, to contact with reality and escape from it, to unveil its strength and its fragility.
Instagram: @maria_chillon