Carlos Sotomayor - A Unique Figure in Chilean Painting (by J. Palacios)

A Unique Figure in Chilean Painting (by J. Palacios)

A retired employee of the Chilean Railways, quiet, with a distant air, most people would not suspect that he is an artist, particularly a modern one. However, this unassuming artist inspired the critic Antonio Romera to write about him: 'Perhaps, in the entire history of Chilean painting, there isn't a clearer example of dedication to artistic creativity for its own sake.' And it would be difficult to find a more fitting observation.

Even as a teenager he displayed an innovative vision. At 14, he took part in a poster competition for the Spring Festival, encouraged by his father. An excellent draughtsman, with a line capable of expressing both the graceful and the vigorous in the classical tradition, Carlos Sotomayor could have worked entirely figuratively, an approach which would have brought him instant commercial success. With his mastery of line, he could also have diversified into printmaking, but his instinct was for painting. As a result, in 1934 he joined the Grupo Decembrista, a neocubist group led by the poet Vicente Huidobro, one of his most fervent admirers, who revealed his enthusiasm for Sotomayor's work in the magazine PRO published in the same year.

Curiously, it was the writers of the avant-garde who were the first to recognise Sotomayor's genius. E. Anguita, who won the 1988 Writer of the Year Award, Julio Molina and Guillermo Atías were among his greatest apologists, praising him as a painter who did not confine his work to the replication of reality, or to conventional romanticism. Supported by the solid foundation of his drawings, Sotomayor alters reality in order to render it more real, in the quest for more sensitive communication through highly personal, expressive forms. He is both violent and tender at the same time.

He remains an enigma, a solitary figure, praised by a few and still unknown to the majority. He doesn't win official accolades, nor do they hold any interest for him. Quiet, retiring, conversing only with his friends, the artist is not afraid of confronting his own solutions. Sensitive to current events, the initial figuration suddenly emerges in his work, but not as a final phase of his expression, only as the rebelliousness of a pure spirit. It is for this reason that, although efforts have been made to pigeonhole it, Sotomayor's work admits no labels. Picasso may be in the background, but it is because he admires in him, above all, his creative independence. The poet E. Anguita goes as far as saying that Sotomayor's painting is like the image of a "restless idea", a definition which the critic Romera elaborates on, underlying it as "a certain restlessness or agitation of the spirit.'.