La Serena, the second oldest city in Chile: a place where time passes between valley and sea; a place where people walk through Avenida del Mar Avenue while enjoying the breeze; the city of the bell towers; this provincial life so different from the rush capital. This is the place where Nelson Plaza was born.
His mother cooked and painted huaso handkerchief with syringe. His father taught how to make and raise a paper rocket. He learnt to hear goals and soccer plays in his grandfather’s battery radio. One day, he found and artwork encyclopedia. Facts and details were moment that move him closer to the artistic world and, otherwise, show him the way; that he is. “In my adolescence, I was in contact with friends in the School of music we dreamt to be artists and poets. This way, I moved to Santiago to study in the Universidad de Chile University,” said the artist.
Nelson Plaza reminds that he always drew and painted, but he met engraving when he was 18 years old and was studying Bachelor of Arts. He changed city, life, and friends. But the influences remained intact: Borges’s and Negro Fontanarros’s tales; Frank Zappa and Les Luthiers’ music; the Mexican painter José Luis Cuevas’s creations, one of the main people of the Generación de Ruptura with the Mexican muralism, and, at the same time, one of the most highlighted representative of the neo- figurativism.
“For me, art is another way to speak. It’s the only way in which I understand and see the world,” he specifies. His work is a continuous transformation where he influences with imperceptible changes that appear. Engraving, graphic’s language, and poetry every aspect in his life: as a teacher, professional printer, and artist. His work has always moved between drawing, painting, and engraving, where have developed subjects related to art history.
With 42 years old, he has exhibited 21 times; collective and individual exhibitions; National and international. It was in Mexico, in 1998, when he exhibits his works for the first time outside the country, during his participation in the 9th Ibero-American Art Biennale. After that, galleries didn’t lack: Argentina, Brazil, United States, and Chile. From this opportunity to now, the artist has exhibited his work in many galleries and biennales; at least, once a year (if it’s not two.)
The last exhibition made by Plaza was in the early 2016. Sistemas, in the Universidad Católica de Temuco’s art gallery, was compound by around 40 works, between engravings and drawings, appealing to “the meaning of this word and its diverse senses. In one hand, they represent all they ways to organize that compound a human body and, in other hand, they have been made under self-imposed adjustments to mi artistic practice,” he says.
Nelson Plaza defines his work “as an imaginary that is assembled from the love for drawing.” His option for engraving has to do with drawings, and he uses the line as a producer element of image. His workshop, Ars Lucis, is where he works. This last period, he has developed the human anatomy as a subject, and the awful of its representation; inspired by books, movies, and other artworks; referring to art history and “what happens inside the artists,” he concludes.
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