 | Eyes Looking at Eyes Bernardita Vattier has always been an indefatigable investigator. In her trajectory and according to her lived experiences, she has looked forward to reveal in her art a particular "vision" of the world that surrounds her. She has done this capturing in images, and through different interventions, thematic linked to the environment, to our way of life and to our society, in a language universal and many times critic, not exempt from polemic. In her last exhibition, her work enlarged the analysis toward identity. There, among those sketches, was insinuated a strong image that became the central theme that she delivers: a great iris, an eye appealing directly to other eyes, to each spectators that, somehow, feel observed. Hence the name there of this exhibition: the “Observed Glance", eyes looking at eyes that don't allow us to continue past long before them. Is not casual that, in the digital era, one of the methods to identify people is the fingerprint (already approached in her previous exhibition), and then the iris. Another parallel fact to the investigation that Bernardita Vattier began around the look, was the coincidence of an operation to the eyes that she had waited for years; an operation that opened up for her a fan that was unknown to her: the perception of more intense and more alive colors, the marvel of looking directly without glasses, something that could not but influence her in this new series of Works. It is does that she noticed that her personal restlessness was also that of others, and that many artists along the history had felt deeply attracted as much for the eye as for the quality of the vision: the eye like shape and as a sign; the vision like an orderly power of the observed reality, or the lack of it can take us from complete darkness to the distortion of the images. Vattier comes closer to the utmost center of the eye, the iris, and she discovers not only its capacity of being a sign of identity, but the mark left in it the different diseases that affect the possibility of seeing. We see each other this way before expanded eyes at great scale, with their defects exposed -exhibited there at our sight -, as if the observer came closer to them carrying a giant magnifying glass. In the process of giving form to her intuitions, she began to observe attentively how men represented the eye in art. In all times and places, from Egypt and the first civilizations until the present time, it perceived the desire and coincidence of granting a very important place to the vision and the fundamental characteristics of the organs that made it possible. Big, small, open, closed, sick, healthy, each one transmitted that same admiration that produces us something that goes beyond our exact understanding. For in spite of all the studies and advances, sight is a great gift and a deep mystery. Gift and mystery that makes us impossible to describe the colors and the gleam of the forms to a sightless person. Another remarkable sphere is, without a doubt, her election of emblematic artists that worked this feature; among them, Bourgeois, Miró, Van Gogh. Because for any visual artist, the vision is primordial and gives sense to their chore. Not in vain the art is made to be contemplated and assessed. “All things enter for the eye." The visual impact is always important. Lights and shades invite us to look our surroundings and they appeal to the ambivalence of the visuality that contains in itself as certain possibilities the grace to see, or the misfortune of losing sight or to have never possessed it. Vattier approaches these ideas of meticulous way, making us thankfull for having the fortune of see, and the capacity to enjoy what we see.
Bárbara Becker Gana
Lic. History & Aesthetics PUC. | | 
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