Alchemist of forgotten stories.

• Author: Montecino, Marcelo
• Position: Artist Guillermo Nunez

In 1975 Guillermo Nunez went to jail for being disrespectful of the powers that be. During the darkest days of the military regime, Nunez had inaugurated an exhibition in the Chilean-French Institute for Culture in Santiago, Chile, consisting of a roomful of cages filled with the most diverse objects: roses, birds, reproductions of the Mona Lisa, and other things. Perhaps the one that most ruffled the military was a red, white, and blue knotted tie hanging upside down. A not-so-subtle allusion to a noose. The show lasted the opening night festivities before it was closed by the authorities early the next morning. Nunez was arrested soon after that, and was "disappeared" for twenty days and later spent several months in prison. Upon release, he was expelled from the country as a "danger to national security." It would be twelve years before he could return.

Nunez, born in Santiago in 1930, is a gentle, soft-spoken, generous man, who has been painting, engraving, writing, and designing for the theater since he entered the capital's School of Fine Arts in 1949. He spent many years abroad studying theater and the great masters. Yet after discovering Rembrandt and Delacroix in 1953, he was so overwhelmed that he decided to give up painting. He traveled through Europe, meeting Roberto Matta, Chile's surrealist master, in Paris. On his return to Chile in 1958 he painted murals for Salvador Allende's second presidential campaign. The following year he traveled to Czechoslovakia to study engraving but was expelled from art school for being too abstract.

In a catalog for an exhibition in 1962 he wrote: "A painter has a responsibility to his times, and I want to assume mine. Painting is a dialogue or a discussion, never a dead sign: something ebullient that goes back and forth between the artist and the spectator. An adventure without conformity, without preestablished positions: only the feeling that abandoning all symbols re-creates the very moment of pain, anguish, and violence."

These days Nunez is still challenging authority. This time it is taking the form of coveting the walls in several sites in Santiago with hundreds of large prints of his enigmatic images. The idea is to let the seasons, weather, environment, the shadows of trees, and passersby interact with his large silkscreens. The installation is called, appropriately enough, Alchemy.

Although it is a simple enough idea, it was not that easy to implement. Several municipalities of...