TEXTILES IN ENCOUNTER: JAIME POBLETE 2024–2025
| by Elena Redaelli |
Jaime Poblete’s recent work is poised to engage with encounters: with materials and processes, with other people, and with larger landscapes. That openness has deep roots in his trajectory. Trained in Scenography and Art History at the Universidad de Chile, he worked as a set designer, learning to consider light, spatial relations, and the audience. At Artefacto, Francisco Gonzalez’s studio, he assisted and taught, refining a practice where making remains visible in form. From 2002 to 2007, as a restorer at MAC in Santiago, he learned patience with material change and the quiet memory held in artefacts. Migration to Europe, first to Valencia for further study, and then in 2011 to Erba near Como, gave him a cross-cultural perspective on symbols and place.
Since 2016, he has departed from the formal use of the canvas, moving from a pictorial surface toward research that gives visible form to the relations among light, space, and matter. The canvas became a thinking fabric. A small black work from that year, an irregular pentagon in wood, clad in coarse textile and hollowed by a circular void, remains the pivot.
“The canvas no longer belonged to me,” Poblete recalls. “Fabric, not painted but soaked, folded, and sewn,” answered. Form itself demanded the change.” Wooden armatures that were first dressed were later set aside, allowing the textiles to fall freely, their essential structures shaped by gravity.
From there, a grammar of folds, knots, and rehangs kept the work permeable to context. Set within a trullo in Apulia or within a prison in Como, this grammar becomes a practice of encounter, where the piece adjusts to stone, to air, to others, or remains deliberately unfinished. (…)
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