Luis Andrés Gleixner

Tall, robust, Luis Andrés Gleixner approached with a smile on his face — a half-amused, half-worried smile that seemed to say: "What are you going to do with me?" He sat down confidently, punctuating his gesture with an almost childish clumsiness. Then he smiled as if everything was normal, and seemed ready to answer my questions.

"Aren't you Chilean?" Funny question. He replied with simplicity: "Indeed, a whole branch of my family comes from Russia, Germany, Holland too… I look more like a Russian than a Chilean, yet if you look closely you can almost detect traits of Mapuche — it must come from the other branch of my family, which is very Chilean."

He has lived in Paris for years now. He studied design there and has set up as an independent. "If you don't live exclusively from painting, what does it mean to you?" He had visibly thought about it: "It is a way of keeping a metaphysical universe by my side. Next to the real world, where the audiovisual sector predominates, I always have a way of escaping to something more authentic."

Paint to get out of superficiality — but what does he mean by metaphysics? He starts singing in Spanish, a very nice tune. "It means: the walker only makes his way by walking. What I mean is that with painting I try to think outside the box, I try to go where nobody went again — just to find my place."

Finding one's place is a recurring theme in his work. "In these virgin lands you arrive with your own experience: you clear the land… you also decipher! I paint like we write books: I do it without knowing where I'm going. The layers accumulate and history is written afterwards — then we can do several readings: metaphorical, aesthetic…"

It is certain — the texture of his paintings is deep and meaningful. "A painting only interests me if it expresses a certain accomplishment. On a canvas I want to see the worn side, the experience… what I call 'leather'. You can read the experience of a leather just by looking at it. When you look at one of my paintings it's the same: you see the cycles of construction, destruction and reconstruction that marked it, that gave it its unique identity."

On his face too you can read a lot when he talks about his painting: obvious marks of sincerity, disturbing marks of lucidity, constant marks of tenacity.