“No one sleeps in heaven. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody sleeps.
Creatures of the moon smell and haunt their cabins.
Live iguanas will come to bite men who do not dream
and he who flees with a broken heart will find around the corners
to the incredible crocodile still under the tender protest of the stars.”

City without a dream (1929), Federico García Lorca

Coming across these paintings makes you hear staring owls hooting, penetrating; the climbing of gigantic spiders; the raking of vipers on the rotten wood, leaves and mosses; the howl of beings with faces and limbs decaying; portraits of humans hidden from the light, with deformations typical of those who did not receive the fortune of the sun. In definitively, a landscape of shadows. However, these appearances of beings nightmares meet with their nocturnal complement: couples wishing each other in the vertigo of the furtive; plants shaped like genitals; animals, insects and ghosts that the artist, despite her deformity, does not it takes away the ability to feel and feel, caress and caress.

This exhibition is as little programmatic as it is libidinal. He responds to Josefina Concha E.’s impulse to exploit her voracious relationship with painting, usually sublimated by their sculptural textiles, the which he creates after having given flesh to enlarged quilts, layer by layer, using threads sewn by torrid machines. Machines that whip like turbines a wooden floor in Santiago, an insistent noise and repetitive that can become a nightmare. The painting, then, becomes for Josefina an escape from this mechanical action, the painting is a safe, trustworthy, sheltered and sheltered place, even if it is a figurative expressionism that makes it seem like the skin is emerges from the models, it continues to be the family space where the artist It returns activating sight before any sense.

For this reason, Night Excursions invites us to a wasteland of natural creatures and fantastic, represented in small paintings and volumetric textiles attached to structures as if at any moment they were going to break flight. Works that are hidden behind waning and waxing moons. Since they are never exposed to complete clarity, they need enough brilliance to allow us to look at them from our dry landscape, observe that tremulous and humid region, wetter than the swampy city of Buenos Aires.

Since it is essential to understand the importance of escaping from our daily lives, contemplating this zoo of monsters and lovers, It means compromising that our day-to-day turbines do not end up exhausting us. Exit madding crowd is something that all of us who dedicate ourselves to the industry aspire to art and, unfortunately, in general we are required to shout, as if the Burning cities were not enough. “Life is not a dream, alert! alert! alert!”, wrote García Lorca.

I like to think that a snake can be the analogy of discipline pictorial for the artist. Thus, some vipers come out of a man’s head asleep, is that city—finally—of sleep, one where the reptile spreads throughout the landscape chatting with his animal companions and humans convincing them to catch us. That snake that is painting in itself has no end, a grazing beast that all the time explores original districts, is looking for new things and, in those alleys that open, it gets tangled, knotting, staying for a while in that problem of color, brushstroke, style, school. Then he gets bored you hate conventions but, as the same poem already cited says: “to the one who fears death will carry it on his shoulders”, within the failures the Disappointment must be the most terrible of them. In short, if this is the way of understanding Josefina’s painting, I couldn’t agree more.

In this exhibition, Josefina Concha E. proposes to us to experience painting as an escape from the cruel reality we live in. Thank you, first and foremost largely by these two-dimensional works and, later, by company affective, by its fabrics, thus all these works inhabit a city where it fantastic and dreamlike have escaped, which has sneaked into the capital of Buenos Aires which has been transformed this time, as on other occasions in its history, in a city without sleep.

Finally arriving at this wasteland of monsters and lovers, it was not because he was a viewer somewhat more or less informed about the subjective universe of artist, his career and his interests, but because this exhibition is a suggestive invitation for your viewers. And, before closing with a dull quote from Freudian psychoanalysis, which in a somewhat linear way understands death with desire as a double side of the same coin. No, I want to make it more complex in a fantastic personal universe, since it is not It is only the exceptional quality of these pieces that calls me to write and accompany, but the possibility of committing myself to an illusion. Before to lower the blinds of complete fantasy and enter the city without sleep, Let’s let ourselves be enchanted for a moment by the possibility of walking with creatures tonight.

Matías Allende Contador
Chile, April 2024