Twittear

The eye / Biography

Born in Vallenar Chile in 1970, Mauricio Toro Goya lives in Coquimbo (IV Region, Chile) where he developed an important job as a photographer and a cultural activist agent. With Art, Design and Photography formal studies, he has been involve with this last discipline since childhood, as it was in his own house where he experimented with the chemical processes and did his initiation ritual in a darkroom. From a young age he maintains communication with Sergio Larrain, the great Chilean referential photographer. Through a sustained epistolary contact, the Chilean of Magnum becomes a guide and master to Toro Goya. Afterwards, in Mexico, he improves the nineteenth century ambrotype technique with the anthropologist and photographer, the master Waldemaro Concha. Has done more than 40 exhibitions, solos and collectives, in Latin America and Europe, and published at least 16 books with his work. He is consider one of the most interesting contemporary Chilean photographers with a great international projection.

The rectangle / Esthetics and Work

The work of Mauricio Toro Goya is defined by two repetitive constant throughout his photographic series: the use of ancient procedures, usually the ambrotype, which had a great validity between 1852 and 1865, approached from a contemporary logic and the development of specific subjects manifested in a staging with allegorical character. With a revisionist vocation for the Latin-American iconographic tradition, especially of the religious matrix, his work is built based on a series of carefully chosen elements that intermingle to elaborate a deep social, historic, economic and political criticism which questions and tenses the hegemonic speeches. Through nudity, ritual evocation, political speech, the presence of a festive and defused death, the animal omnipresence or the own elements of a mass and consumption culture. His work takes charge of the brutality and violence that historic processes hide, giving place to the Latin-American identity and the conformation of the national stories. The popular oral tradition, the legends, the myths, the literary constructions are in his source of inspiration. His work, in the author’s words, "reflects on the society in an innovating way using ancient technical sources as base of his esthetic proposal".