Poem

An artist with a highly versatile visual oeuvre, Jorge Eduardo Eielson is better known for his extensively studied and discussed literary work. His practice involved painting, sculpture, performance, installation and photography, exploring the paths of conceptual and experimental art; however he always returned to painting. In 1959, while living in Rome, he began the series The Infinite Landscape of Peru’s Coastline, consisting of mixed-media works made with sand and scraps that he had brought with him from his home country. With these elements, he made drawings of tracks and grooves, and enunciated words that evoke both the desert and the sea, determining the affective limits experienced in self-exile as well as in the territory itself. This approach to the landscape of the desert and the Peruvian coastline –which arises as a theme of representation in Peruvian literature, painting and photography as a counterpoint to indigenous motifs– has continued to propose a nearly abstract perspective on the places that inherently link the past and present of a kind of alternative cultural identity. (TC & VQ)