The Gold of Peru QK

Rodríguez Larraín is a key figure of a generation which, in the 1950s, engaged in a rupture with the static tradition of the local modernism. His work reveals a perspective clearly defined by his initial education as an architect – both his pictorial work as well as all his sculptures are defined in planes, cross-sections or perspectives. However, besides the evident rationalism of his constructions, there is a clear identification with certain elements of late surrealism. This encounter between the clarity of mathematical thinking and the irrationality of the unconscious gave rise to the singular incisiveness of the objects he creates. L’or du Pérou QK plays with one of the commonplace images of Peru: the idea of gold, which evokes the lost splendor of the pre-Colombian period as well as the suggestion of deception associated to the French phrase “Ce n’est pas le Pérou.” The piece in shiny bronze –not actually gold– contained in the box, as though it were a precious object, is, in reality, an indescribable object, an invented sculptural form, which evokes a wide range of phallic and simultaneously repressive associations – the leather sheath makes a direct reference to a policeman’s billy club. Here, Rodríguez Larraín gathers the surrealist tradition of the boîte-en-valise and the fantastic object, certainly under the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, artists with whom he maintained a close friendship. However, the work is not limited to a single meaning; its richness is more evident in its capacity to evoke the multiple tensions that pervade eroticism, power and violence.