Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito
Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito (1987, San Miguel, Chile).
Visual artist. Lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
He holds a PhD in Arts and a Bachelor of Arts from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
His work is experimental in nature, with an emphasis on drawing, painting, and video. He explores reality through graphic wanderings, combining the figurative and the abstract through lines, stains, and calligraphy.
In his work, painting manifests itself as thinking matter, with a gestural, expressive, and often unfinished structure. He also makes videos that document his interventions and pictorial processes.
He works with techniques such as collage, frottage, and montage, addressing material fractures, the traces of time, and the contrasts between visual components.
Petrous Investitures (NAT Art Residence - 06/2024)
Petrous Investitures is the title of the series that brings together the creative experiences I developed during my residency in Cantabria. It refers to the various efforts I made to connect with a landscape charged with history—or, more precisely, with what has come to be called Prehistory. I was particularly interested in engaging directly with that European Prehistory so often referenced in the art history manuals through which, inevitably, I was trained as an artist in the distant lands of Chile. To finally stand before those traces was also to think about origins: a primordial experience that placed before me the question of what it means to be human.
In Cantabria, I not only encountered millennia-old aesthetic expressions, but also found the time and space to ask myself what kind of relationship I could establish with that earliest art. With this question in mind, I walked the region’s trails and beaches, allowing myself to be moved by its landscapes, by their vastness, and by their monumental geographic wounds. Through these movements, I experienced a bodily, sensitive, and direct connection with the rocks—with their textures, their hardness and softness. Thanks to this, I can say I carried back with me a mineral memory in my body: an embodied recollection of my contact with stone.
Stone Porosities
The artist drags a rock across various rocky surfaces along the steep shoreline of Cantabria, Spain, specifically in the area of Tagle, Suances. In a setting that evokes a mineral abyss opening toward the sea, a painted sheet of paper is placed between the stones, wounding itself and capturing the traces of friction. The action, repeated in multiple locations, reveals the porous and singular textures of each rock. The harsh sound of stone scraping against stone, combined with the sea’s powerful and intermittent presence, envelops the scene as a dual agent of erosion and resonance.
Petrous Investitures I
The artist performs a frottage on the rocky surfaces of the steep coast of Cantabria, Tagle, Suances, Spain. Through this process, the natural textures and patterns of the stone are captured as pictorial imprints on a rectangular blackout fabric, whose rubber-coated backing prevents the paint from seeping through and staining the rock. The textile surface receives the paint and transfers the mineral texture as a form of intimate and particular inscription. Toward the end of the action, an unpremeditated gesture emerges: the artist wraps himself in the painted fabric, as if investing himself with the very image of the rock. The video documents this transition—from impression to embodiment—where the rocky surface becomes both trace and garment.
Petrous Investitures II
Second work in the Petrous Investitures series, which reflects on the act of becoming stone. Created along the coast of Cantabria, specifically near the cliffs of Tagle, Suances. The action consists of a frottage on rocky surfaces, where natural textures and patterns are captured as pictorial imprints on a rectangular blackout fabric. Its rubber-coated backing prevents the paint from seeping through and staining the rock. The textile surface receives the paint and transfers the mineral texture as a form of intimate and particular inscription. In this second installment, the gesture of investing herself with the image of the stone becomes more defined, more radical: the body blends into the landscape to the point of near disappearance, dissolving into the mineral texture that surrounds it.
Caving into Stone
The artist carries out an engraving action on a rock at El Sable beach in Tagle, Suances, Cantabria, Spain. Through insistent gestures, he carves the mineral surface slowly, while the sonic backdrop of the sea accompanies the process. The work captures the effort of inscribing a trace onto the stone through the repeated impact and pressure of smaller rocks used as chisels, evoking a tension between permanence, erosion, and creative act.
