María Ossandón Recart
Featured Artist
Volume One, Issue Three, “Plein Air,” Visual Art
In selections from three different series, María Ossandón Recart builds intricate ink drawings around shards of shattered plates, picked from the rubble following an earthquake or discovered at antique fairs around the world. From these fragments of decorated plateware, María fills in what is missing: the rest of the plate, and of the scene.
“I am an earthquake,” one of the series’ titles declares: a line borrowed from the Chilean poet Vicendo Huidobro’s poem, “Altazor,” a poem about the theoretical and artistic creation of a new world from the fragments of what was before. María similarly reconfigures and recontextualizes the found shards of porcelain plates from broken, unusable tableware into something whole, a work of art. In her collection process following an earthquake, María focused on retrieving shards of Willow de Lozapenco plates, widely used in Chilean homes from the seventies to the nineties. These plates are instantly recognizable to the Chilean viewer, washing them in memories, perhaps of their own childhood and family gatherings. The origins of these shards, however, are tinged with loss and grief, found and adapted by the artist after the destruction of a family’s home. María Ossandón combines the porcelain and her ink additions to create a new memory of the plates while imagining their existence and their appearance before their fragmentation.
María further considers domesticity, memory, and fragmentation in her reconstrucción and reconstrucción II series. With porcelain sourced from around the world, María nods to the past while adding her own interpretation to each shard. Meticulously rendered ink on paper, each piece feels like a world open for the viewer to enter, a quiet country cottage or an elaborate cityscape. Simultaneously, the viewer becomes hyper-aware of this constructed reality in the juxtaposition between the delicate lines of Ossandón’s paints and the harsh, angular shards of the broken plates. Though the style appears quite accurately mimicked, one becomes aware of how the colors do not quite match in noticing the different textures of the combined materials. This could make the work seem even more constructed and thus unreal, but for María, this is a purposeful choice. It makes the pieces apparently collaborative, an amalgam of the plate designer in the past and María Ossandón in the present.
—The Editors
I work with scale change—with miniature landscapes inside different structures or containers. My art begins, first, with the idea for a collection and then with the search for materials. These materials guide the direction of my work.
Up until now, two moments—by no means sequential—have characterized my work. The first moment involves my (continued) experiments with representations of landscapes or miniature scenes. Though each depiction involves a certain level of artificiality, they don’t detract from what we know about nature and urban nature in particular. This is the world I live in: it's of a framed, gentle nature, made of artifice, and of an order that allows it to survive in different forms.
When we look to nature, we always do so with cultivated eyes, with a particular image or vision in mind. Therefore, there is no “true” nature, only a construction of it, and this construction is what we determine to be a “landscape.” As such, the word “landscape,” in my work, demands a particular interpretation: because the landscapes we recognize are not independent entities—they do not exist aside from us—they become inseparable from our memories, our stories, our experiences, our desires, and our freedom.
The second moment of my work concerns the reconstruction of ceramics and porcelain from different countries. These artifacts are found in antique fairs and each in different states of preservation. I chose pieces that once found their value in homes; those spaces in which we, today, can reflect on our imaginaries and idealizations of the past, of a way of life that resists complete erasure. It is through these ceramics that I seek to complete or reproduce the scenes they once represented. I aim to be faithful to their original artistic intention while also allowing me the possibility for a personal re-elaboration of their message.
Finally, miniature art obliges the viewer to physically approach the work because it can’t be truly appreciated from a distance. This idea departs from more frontal forms of access to art; it forces people to change the positions of their bodies in the act of observation and it takes away the grandeur implied in distance.
María Ossandón Recart was born in Santiago de Chile in 1986. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the ARCIS University. In 2008, she won the first prize installation mention in the “Arte en vivo” contest, organized by the National Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago of Chile. In 2017, she received the BIAFARIN prize for 10 young artists selected at the International NordArt exhibition in Büdelsdorf, Germany, and in 2018 the Malamegi Lab 9 Arts Laboratory acquisition prize (Venice, Italy). She has participated in different group exhibitions and art fairs both in Chile and in other countries.