Mecánica del Accidente (The Mechanics of the Accident) is a new body of work by Chilean artist Cristobal Anwandter where he plays with ideas that can be seen as incompatible, accidents, that are by their nature fortuitous and unpredictable, with mechanical processes.
From the very title, Cristóbal Anwandter appears to attempt to juggle incompatible ideas. Accidents are fortuitous and unpredictable; flaws -or mistakes- from machines or from humans. To assign them a mechanical process would seem absurd, an oxymoron. But it is not so in the poetics of this artist. Because Anwandter works against his own easiness, against his usual practice. The figurative painter that he used to be relinquishing his place to an abstract one; the painting brush turns into a scraper; the stain into a pattern; absolute control into a controlled gamble.
In the same way Abstract Expressionists, by way of Surrealists, did, Anwandter creates the conditions necessary to discover images from the imprecise assumptions of a 'expressionist technique of printing'. Another paradox.
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