LC: The full span of your artwork includes both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms.  There are strong architectural and design sensibilities that run through your work.  Your drawings, like the series in this exhibition, often evoke the architecture of an interior space, and many of your sculptures feel like architectural models for larger structures.  What role do architecture and design play in your art practice?

GP: I consider myself as much a painter as a sculptor. It depends on the day, although for periods (years) I have devoted myself to one craft and then the other. While I tend to pay close attention to the surface of my sculptures, in my painting, the three-dimensional aspect has become decisive, especially in my latest images. Sometimes I have created intermediate works: simultaneously pictorial and sculptural.

Craftsmanship has been a constant throughout my working life. By this, I also mean that I make a lot of decisions along the way. In this sense, design does not play a major role, as I rarely make preliminary sketches. What does matter to me is composition. I am referring to the need to put together a whole that feels like one and the challenge of balancing the different. The feeling of fit, coherence, and unity, especially when working with very different things, as in my case, is not easy to achieve. The greater the heterogeneity between the components of an image, the greater the difficulty in generating dependence between them.

As for architecture, I am forced to admit that I am a frustrated architect. Nowadays, I find it hard to imagine myself as an architect, but there is a family influence. On my mother's side, there are several people linked to architecture. One name stands out: Gustavo Mönckeberg Bravo (1884-1944). There are still some buildings in Santiago designed by him, my great-grandfather. But for me, it was his son Hernán, my grandfather, who drew my attention to architecture in an emotional way, from the outset, because he was also an architect. And he unwittingly introduced me to watercolor painting, beyond what one learns as a schoolchild.

I had flashbacks of my grandfather painting his watercolors when I painted Set. In the past, architectural plans were often painted with India ink and watercolor, both of which were commonly used in architectural work. I imagine that's why my grandfather painted with watercolors in his spare time: landscapes, portraits, etc., usually based on photographs. He was an amateur painter. And I remember his impeccable work table in his apartment, full of graphite pencils, markers, and different round brushes grouped in different containers, several rulers organized on one side, and paper almost always in the center of that intimidating architect's board. It was an altar, untouchable for his grandchildren.

Set is somewhat the result of that board. In fact, I work on the series with very similar tools, all in a more modest and disorderly version. The spaces I represent in each image are indeed architectural. But instead of facades, I design more or less absurd interiors, with twisted and/or contradictory perspectives, for example. And I am possibly more interested in the everyday use of architecture, without wanting to know about its users, excluding them from my scenes, in fact.

LC: There is a wonderful exuberant sense of materiality combined with an additive collaging of patterns in your work.  Can you talk a bit about your process in creating the series of watercolors in this exhibition?

GP: Set depicts a suffocating, flat space, sometimes precarious and absurd. It refers to a movie set and, less explicitly, to a game.

The game, as in some sport, is the general method with which I paint: I propose to play with geometry and the overflow of the stain, with the plane and the “illusion” and, by the way, with improvisation and a certain systematization. According to these parameters, I allow myself to quote the history of art (cubism, surrealism, and/or abstraction) but also the world of comics (Condorito).  

My set's design features a set of materials, such as stone, wood, fabric, and bricks. I never lose sight of the fact that I am representing things. I have forced myself to imitate these surfaces because I have been doing so since 2011 and because, obviously, my focus in them has not yet waned. It is quite likely that my interest in simulating materials comes from architectural painting, which could be considered a B-story of painting. The sometimes rough marbling of pillars and altarpieces in so many adobe churches in Chile or those built of wood, such as those in Chiloé island, have triggered much of that interest in me. In turn, the decorated cloaks of saints and virgins present in those same churches have lingered in my mind to this day.

I must acknowledge here the constant influence of my wife and her profession: she is a restorer. Thanks to Mary Ann, I have seen 17th-century polychrome wood sculptures up close, for example. So, if Set has a baroque mood, I think it is not only because of the number of elements that compose it, but also because of how much the so-called American baroque unsettles me.

LC: The six pieces in this exhibition are a subset of a larger series entitled “Set” that you completed during your residency. In each of the pieces in this series, you employ watercolor, gouache, marker, and graphite on paper.  Each of the identically sized drawings is inset within a patterned background that is partially visible beneath the central drawing and serves as a framing device. The drawings themselves appear to be almost stage sets of interiors for some mysterious story.  What appeals to you about working with a series where multiple factors connect the works together?

GP: Armed with a graphite pencil, ink marker, watercolor, and gouache, I have worked on Set on papers of the same size, laid out horizontally. I put together (and continue to put together; the series is still open) a preliminary and simple grid capable of evoking and structuring the design of a room somewhere between a house and a studio. I use the propelling pencil to draw that grid, sometimes before painting, and sometimes after a first wash: straight lines, it varies, although it preserves the same lateral margins.

Although I make the rules flexible when working on Set, I find them essential when creating that series or any other work. I truly believe that creative freedom does not depend so much on doing anything you want, but rather on consciously deciding what limits to follow, what game to invent, and what rules that game—hopefully a new one—will have. In my experience, these things are largely defined by the process itself as the work takes shape. At least, that's what I try to do: follow the will of the work.

In any case, I think humor is essential, starting with the fact that it can dismantle any system. So, when you become very rigid or serious (while creating a work), taking things with humor can be urgent. In a more concrete sense, I love seeing several finished images from Set together because they look like vignettes that make up a sequence. I don't have a conventional pre-established script. I prefer to look at several of my watercolors from the distance of a viewer, who can imagine very different stories. They may suggest the adventures, both stormy and humorous, of some prototypical artist or some strange inhabitant of often absurd interiors. Anyway, when I see them together, I can't help but smile and think of Condorito again.