Felipe Lavín: Desvanecidos
Post-photography, hypermodernity, hyper-consumerism. These are the themes and concepts handled by Felipe Lavín (Santiago de Chile, 1987). In his series of digital photographs Desvanecidos (2020-2022), Lavín goes beyond attractive symmetries and superficial colors to address how these (along with a plethora of vertiginous advances) reflect a society that dehumanizes and erases the individual. Through his images, the artist portrays a condition of hyper-advanced alienation, a reality in which people increasingly lose their identity in pursuit of the times and technical advances that we live in.
In this sense, Lavín plays the role of a modern-day Virgilio for our warm hell. His training as an engineer pushes him to anonymous architectures and non-places (airports, highways and subways in more than twenty cities around the world) as perfect scenarios of a prosaic alienation that he resents and criticizes. According to the artist, this series "has been mutating to exaggerate even more the concepts of depersonalization, loneliness and individualism". Through photographic images that have undergone post-production processes, Lavín materializes a key observation of anthropologist Marc Augé: "in the subway we keep brushing against the history of others without ever finding it".
For ArtBo 2022, Factoría Santa Rosa proposes a single show from Felipe Lavín's Desvanecidos series. His pixelated beings have no heads and their bodies are lost like smoke. "Hence the pixel," explains Lavín: "it's a lack of information that can't be read."
Christian Viveros-Fauné
La Factoría Santa Rosa is a gallery that focuses on the exhibition, diffusion and commercialization of the visual arts. It does this through exhibitions and other extension activities that it carries out periodically. Also, it promotes the work of young and established artists in tune with the motifs of contemporary Latin American art, with a curatorial approach open to proposals that critically reflect on the present, from the different languages and displacements that characterize current art.
He studied Civil Construction at the Catholic University of Chile and attended photography workshops and courses at the same university. During an exchange in Canada in 2010, he studied digital photography at the University of Montreal where he deepened his interest in urban and architectural images.
He studied Civil Construction at the Catholic University of Chile and attended photography workshops and courses at the same university. During an exchange in Canada in 2010, he studied digital photography at the University of Montreal where he deepened his interest in urban and architectural images.
He studied Civil Construction at the Catholic University of Chile and attended photography workshops and courses at the same university. During an exchange in Canada in 2010, he studied digital photography at the University of Montreal where he deepened his interest in urban and architectural images.