Francisco Bruna Zalvidea (Santiago, Chile, 1981) has a degree in Plastic Arts from the Universidad de Concepción and a Master of Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Zalvidea works with painting as an artistic discipline since 2006. In parallel, he works as a teacher in some educational and artistic training institutions in Concepción city.

The work reflects on the social, cultural and political aspects found in different Chilean contexts or territories. With this, what interests him is to “raise” problems linked to history marginalized or made transparent by the great stories of contemporary society. In this sense, what the artist is looking for is to rediscover, visualize and put into tension the symbolic dimension of these stories based on anthropological strategies, such as the presentation of elements and found objects, the trace or ruin as testimony, and the narration as multicultural exchange exercise possible. To achieve this, he has established a specific field work as a reflective and revealing exercise, to the extent that it operates as an articulating bridge of artistic praxis with the territory. In this sense, he is interested in working with invisible places, those deployed on the margins of the city, as well as the withdrawal and precarization of rural life, caused by the industrial and economic models that currently prevail.

To carry out each of the projects in which the artist work, he uses the route, the exchange and the story as strategies or devices with which he establishes a critical and potentially relational approach, which formally displays and materializes through the installation, the video, action, photography and painting. The development or work process that Zalvidea carries to date supposes a displacement of the painting, which is the discipline he has worked with since 2006. In this sense, his work is very “pictorial”, since he sees in the symbolic exercise to present and no longer represent, and in parallel to “dig” in the microhistories of today’s society, a form of palimpsest or – layer by layer – as an analogy of pictorial discipline. In that moment, his work is activated conceptually, poetically and materially.