Vicente Baeza decided, after finishing his studies in Santiago, that he no longer wanted to be a distant observer but rather an involved maker. During that time he created objects from his own clothing, departing from the idea that the clothing was a second skin. He carried out performances with objects of found material, made installations and organized exhibitions: all of this as an attempt, in fact, not to anticipate the outcome of his experiments. The guiding principle was the activity itself. Between 2020 and 2022 he was a resident at De Ateliers. There he began to collect material: anything that could be rolled, such as rolls of wallpaper or thin cardboard. He glued the material together, began to use color, walked across the rolls of paper, rolled them out again and then up again; and after rolling them out once again, he would glue things to them and continue to work on them. He lived with his objects, carried them around town in a knapsack “feeling excited, happy, free”, as he himself put it. Baeza speaks about his works as paintings, but he does not consider them two-dimensional objects to hang on the wall: instead of creating an image, he wants them to evoke space, in a broad sense, both physically and mentally. The decision to become an involved maker has meant that Baeza prefers to designate his work as diaries rather than paintings, as an entity that can sprawl in all directions.
Vicente Baeza (Santiago de Chile, 1992) lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and completed De Ateliers, Amsterdam, in 2022. The work of Baeza has been presented in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including at Espacio Vilches. Santiago, CL (2014); Punt WG, Amsterdam, NL (2021); De Ateliers, Amsterdam, NL (2022); Langkatstraat 15, Amsterdam, NL (2022); Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, IT (2023); Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca, MX (2024); SpazioA, Pistoia, IT (2024); Make Eindhoven, NL (2025); RIB, Rotterdam, NL (2026); and PARK, Tilburg, NL (2026). The work of Vicente Baeza is held in collections internationally.