The violation of private space and the fundamental rights of the citizen are ideas that constantly haunt the viewer of the work of Pablo Linsambarth (Santiago de Chile 1989), like birds of prey flying over landscapes of death.

The story of the Linsambarth family is a story of truncated identity and absences.

According to the family oral memory, the Linsembergs, upon their arrival in Chile at the beginning of the 20th century, were forced to modify their surname in order to make it more Anglo-Saxon and thus be able to settle in the northern part of the country, controlled at that time by large English mining companies. This was also a way to distance the surname from supposed Jewish connotations.  

Decades later, with the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship in the country, the drama of absence would be incorporated into the family history. Pablo Linsambarth's parents were persecuted, his father tortured and his mother had to go into hiding to avoid imprisonment. His great-uncle René, violinist and cellist, was arrested and disappeared in 1973.

This family history represents a consubstantial part of Pablo Linsambarth's imaginary. The figure of absence is omnipresent in his production, generating from its deep emptiness, presence and memory. The loss and the mechanisms used by the victims of repression, as well as by the executioners, are part of the iconographic body of his work.

His work is closely connected to people who have been part of his life in some way, in an imaginary that, on the other hand, expands through a myriad of varied references. From the intimate to the collective memory, from the universal references of the arts to the underground urban culture, passing through music or sport.

Pablo Linsambarth thus generates a thrilling neo-Renaissance universe, in a baroque poetic narrative where the enigma, in turn, is a powerful resource for reflection on the meta-pictorial potential of painting and in which irony and humor play the role of an agglutinating balm.

This exuberant pictorial language is structured through expressionist scenarios in which protagonists and landscape coexist outside the laws of perspective, scales or hierarchies, in a deconstructed and fascinating game of planes. The light shapes such disturbing spaces, generating color planes heirs of the Fauvist pictorial expression and the stroke emerges as a gestating element of the painting.

The exhibition "Allanamiento de-morada" at El Apartamento gallery in Madrid, illustrates the way in which the edges and limits of Linsambarth's painting -origin of his artistic universe- are diluted and generate other types of artistic supports such as video, drawing or ceramics.  

The scene of the painting that gives its name to this exhibition, or the one recreated in the canvas "La comida", could well be the opening of the chronicle of the terrible story that takes place in the installation "En el desierto" (In the desert). On the other hand, the portraits of the characters represented in the set of ceramics presented for the first time in this exhibition, could also be the unfortunate protagonists of other, and at the same time equally bloody chronicles of disappearances and death.

Drawing will be a guide for his pictorial compositions and an exercise of cathartic automatic artistic expression in his work on paper, with a virtuous handling of the technique from the emphatic schematic expression of line and color.

At the same time, the importance of drawing, line and color also connects directly with his video production as a visual tool. Video always gravitates in Pablo Linsambarth's artistic production, as an extension of the issues addressed in his pictorial work and his artistic resources. Specifically, the two-minute looping video "Repito" (I repeat), also the first time his video production is shown in Madrid, suggests the unreasonableness of a History, in which empty discourses are repeated, lacking any hint of significant progress towards a world far from autocratic systems.

Pia Ogea