Rodrigo Zamora Santiago de Chile, b. 1970

Rodrigo Zamora’s artistic practice explores perception as an evolving, fractured experience. Working primarily through painting, drawing, and sculpture, he navigates the tension between intuition and structure, chance and control. His process draws from an attentive, meditative engagement with the world—walking, observing, collecting—as well as from deep material experimentation in the studio.

Between 2011 and 2018, Zamora entered a self-described “grey” period, suppressing colour in favour of a graphic, modular language. During this time, his work focused on fragmentation, repetition, and the visual logic of reconstruction—unfolding as a methodical inquiry into image-making. Colour, seen then as a distraction, gave way to structures shaped by rhythm, line, and process.

A pivotal moment came during a residency in Tao Hua Tan, China, where the chromatic intensity of local culture reawakened his interest in saturation. This experience led to a reintroduction of vivid hues into his practice—not as decoration, but as a carrier of memory, emotion, and perceptual dissonance. Since then, colour has re-emerged as an essential element, integrated with intentionality and poetic charge.

Zamora often works with residual or overlooked materials. In his Huellas and Aftertaste series, paper towels and napkins used to blot pigment become artworks in their own right—documents of process, stains transformed into image. These works operate as palimpsests, revealing the layered temporality of the studio and blurring the line between intention and accident.

Music is another undercurrent in Zamora’s work. Certain paintings are tied to specific songs, whose emotional tone shapes the composition’s atmosphere. In his Cromocaligrafías, asemic gestures float like abstract calligraphy, drawing connections between visual language, memory, and sound.

Rodrigo Zamora’s work resists fixed narratives. It lingers in the in-between: between language and image, control and spontaneity, clarity and opacity. Through colour, form, and the poetics of residue, he invites us to inhabit the quiet instability of perception itself.