The landscape of the land or the pictorial expansion in Juan Castillo’s work

Abstract

The following text seeks to explore the various ways in which the landscape, as a genre, can be rethought in order to approach the works of contemporary Chilean artist Juan Castillo, particularly, those called by the artist himself as occupations. Since the late seventies and through all his career, Castillo has insisted in realizing different operations in diverse and extreme geographies, which in each version reactivate the relationship between art and nature, as well as between art and territory. Based on some experiences, as the project titled Your face is the landscape or the one named, Rites of passage, this paper explores, on the one hand, problems which originate in the emergence of landscape as a pictorial discipline in order to raise the validity of this category, and also, on the other hand, to propose a reading of these operations as belonging to a broader field of painting.