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WINTER FLOWERS / FLORES DE INVIERNO, Solo Show at Nac Gallery / Santiago, Chile / March 19 - April 25, 2026

Artishock, Winter Flowers

Antenna.org Winter Flowers

“One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning — some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.” — Mary Oliver

Although Land Art is the official movement of landscape, engagement with the wild nearly a hundred years earlier served as a prelude to what would come later. The Impressionists left their studios to paint in the park, following an invention that made painting a faster and more portable practice: paint in tubes. Freed from the task of grinding pigments and mixing oils, painters headed out with their wooden cases, canvases, and small easels, and encountered the ever-changing phenomenon of light. There, they realized that shadows, contrary to what one might think, breathed color.

Many know that Claude Monet considered his garden his true masterpiece. Few know that the painter had a studio boat. That is to say, he not only painted water obsessively—and the reality reflected in it—but also painted from the water. To paint the pond, he immersed himself in it; thus, in his brushstroke there was not only the illusion of the gentle sway of that aqueous body, but the experience itself, embedded in the canvas.

M. J. Valenzuela shares something with those artists of the past; she even recalls those who, before the Impressionists, ventured on uncertain expeditions—armed to the teeth with their watercolor sets—with the hope of capturing landscapes never touched by human hands. There was, and there is here as well, a kind of urgency to contemplate, and a pressing need to translate it into the notebook. “Winter Flowers,” in that sense, is a journey through that notebook of observations; it is the way M. J. Valenzuela—an artist of the present—extends an archaic invitation, one that transcends time: an invitation to share a way of seeing the natural condition.

As if invoking Claude Monet, who in the early days of that Parisian, industrialized landscape takes us out for a ride in his boat, M. J. Valenzuela leads us by the hand through the forest. She makes her way through the branches, using the ancient tools of drawing and embroidery—and on more modern inventions, like photography—at a time in which the natural landscape has become, practically, a reminder of catastrophe. We must move through this landscape as the poet Mary Oliver suggests: with a deep memory of pleasure and a keen awareness of pain.

Camila Alegría