El nudo de la vida (“The knot of life”) proposes a visual and conceptual reflection on the early work of Chilean artist Juan Downey (1940 – 1993). The exhibition explores part of the pictorial and graphic work developed by the artist in the 1960s, while living in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and New York. The title El nudo de la vida comes from the name of one of the pieces in the exhibition, Le noeud de vie (1965), and aims to poeticize the complex function of the systems between humans and machines, revealing symbolic and psychoanalytic perceptions, the condition of unity and tension, of life and death, of humanity and monstrosity, of desire and fear.

John Downey. El nudo de la vida contains three defined curatorial coordinates. The first, Transubstancias del cuerpo y la máquina (“Transubtances between the body and the machine”), is made of a series of nine paintings and engravings that can be located in the frontiers of figuration and abstraction and adress motifs related to life, death, the body, the machine, infinity, bestiality, and eroticism, among others. In these notions one can appreciate the visual, expansive and radical complexity of Downey’s  perception of the human being and his challenging encounter with technology. The second coordinate, Utopías tecnológicas: Energías, ondas y territorio, invites (“Technological Utopias: Energies, waves and territory”) us to explore the relationships between these concepts based on the possible influence enabled by some of the technologies available at the time. In four pieces, one can see Downey’s impulse to establish artistic and technological networks in the American continent through cutting-edge means such as satellite interconnectivity. The third coordinate is named Diagramas y sistemas complejos (“Diagrams and Complex Systems”) and consists of three drawings that investigate forms of thought and visual models in relation to the history of philosophy, art and psychoanalysis, as well as the relationship of the body and its communicational functions with energy and mechanics.

Juan Downey. El nudo de la vida is an invitation to explore a little-studied period in the work of one of the most important artists in Chilean history. Getting to know part of his early work allows us to discover the strength of his desires and thoughts,  which linked him completely to conceptual and visual territories that he developed throughout his life.