Artist Paula Valenzuela Antúnez
The Creative Edit: Paula Valenzuela Antúnez
Posing five questions to new emerging contemporary artists and creatives, we take an informal yet quick and engaging view of their creative practice. Viewers get to discover more about the new generation of artists + creatives helping shape and narrate the creative landscape.
Paula Valenzuela Antúnez (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile) is a visual artist whose large-scale paintings explore thresholds between the visible and unseen through color, gesture, and atmospheric ambiguity. Her paintings unfold as thresholds between the visible and the unseen, where forms emerge and dissolve in vaporous atmospheres. In an image-saturated world, Valenzuela proposes painting as a place of mystery, pause, and slow unfolding inviting viewers into the delicate suspension of ambiguity. Valenzuela Antúnez’ work has exhibited in both group and solo shows throughout South America and Europe. In 2025, she co-edited Desbordar el cauce: diálogos con artistas contemporáneas, a volume of dialogues with contemporary women artists published by Metales Pesados.
There’s this quiet intimacy in your paintings, but also a subtle invitation to reflect on the human experience. How do you see abstraction as a way to engage with deeper social or emotional questions?
I believe we all have experiences that feel profound but we don’t quite know where to place them, as if they had no literal translation into an image. I think abstraction lives in that space where words are missing, or rather, where words are in excess. The same happens with images: there are images that can certainly evoke feelings, sensations, but the “non-image” is precisely an invitation to contemplation. Looking at a painting and not knowing exactly what it means places us in a slightly more uncomfortable position, because while we feel something from what we see, we can’t quite name it. That, to me, is fascinating because it’s exactly in that moment that we can open ourselves to deeper dialogues with ourselves, touching areas where sensation reigns. If that process brings me questions, I think that’s wonderful; if it brings me answers, that’s great too. For me, the point is to allow that moment of “not understanding,” because this is not about rationality; for me, it’s spiritual. Abstraction destabilizes us in a good way.
I also believe that what we see or feel when looking at an abstract painting keeps changing over time, depending on our inner state. There will be moments when I fix my gaze on the color, and others when I focus on the different shapes that appear. It’s as if the painting were as alive as we are. By not having a single reading, it becomes variable. I think that human beings, now more than ever, need to open themselves to experiences where their “ideas,” “logics,” and “beliefs” disappear at least while observing a painting. If abstraction can lead us there, to a place where, even for a moment, we can rest from so much rationality, concepts, and answers, then it is playing a crucial role in society.
Much of your practice dwells in between the visible and the unseen, the formed and the dissolving. How do you navigate that tension in your use of color and gesture?
I find this question wonderful. Color and gesture - which ultimately generate form - go completely hand in hand; they cannot exist without each other. It is color that gives form its density, its weight, its prominence, its character, and its limits. Without color, it’s as if something were missing for the form to truly become form. In my view, they are inseparable.
This tension is something one learns over time: color imposes limits on form, so these are not whimsical decisions. They complement and define each other, determining how far each can go. The entire proportion of a painting depends on how this tension is managed.
Beyond that, color reacts to the color beside it; therefore, many times it needs to give space to another color or fade behind another to reappear differently. That’s when the dance of painting begins - when I have to make decisions like: How far do I push this color? Where do I start the other? Which edge will touch which form or color? None of this engineering is random. It’s a weave of intuition and knowledge.
After painting for many years, you know how a certain green will react if you place a certain pink next to it, and how that pink will vibrate if you leave it near a lilac. It’s incredibly exciting and challenging. There’s a dance between the visible and the invisible, between what reveals itself and what dissolves. Within that dance, that movement, a trace accumulates - even in what is no longer visible, there was something, and there will be something.
I’m interested in images that are not fully defined, because that makes them infinite, like a journey, a movement.
You recently co-edited a book of conversations with contemporary women artists. What did that process teach you, either about your own practice or about the kinds of questions we don’t ask artists enough?
I always wanted to do something collective that would allow me to take a break from my own practice for a while, without disconnecting from the topics I care about. This book was incredibly important to me because, first of all, I didn’t know my collaborator, we worked together for almost two years conducting interviews. We met because I wrote to her, and we both loved the idea of using the pandemic as a space of support for others.
We were able to delve into questions about the artists’ lives that were clearly connected to their work, but also about their daily realities, their condition as mothers in some cases, their failed projects, their frustrations, their vision of how the art world works, and so on. We had long conversations over Zoom, which we then transcribed, and it all became this incredible book.
The artists were thrilled because they felt it was a welcoming, open, and overflowing space where they could talk about whatever they wanted. So we were really able to dig into their practice and their intimacy in a very gentle, caring way, something we all built together.
The process taught me, above all, that we are not alone, that we are creators who need to know where others are at, and that we can support each other completely against the grain of the individualism that traps us day after day. Personally, I loved resting (without stopping my work) in these moments of necessary sharing.
Sometimes we have the wrong idea that everyone should stick to their own business, but in reality, it’s quite the opposite. We are creatives, and creatives who remain alone and silent, I think, end up dimming their own light. Even if practices differ, they share something in common: a sensitive human being investing energy and heart in developing something. That “something” often lacks the visibility it deserves, and we wanted to open that space—for the practice and for the conversations around it.
When we published the book, the reception was fantastic because artists are not used to other artists wanting to know about them. I think this happened more often in the past, when artists visited each other, had long talks. Those spaces of conversation are a creation in themselves; they are exchanges that feed the soul. And whenever I can, I will create spaces for that to happen.
“When I see the sea, I feel its strength, and I feed on it while feeling it within me. It excites me and moves me because, in truth, it is inside me. It’s as if, in that act of observation, the most essential part of oneself appeared - became active.”
— Paula Valenzuela Antúnez
You wrote this line I keep coming back to: “Between the tree I look at and myself, there is something invisible where the soul moves.” What does nature or landscape mean to you, not just visually, but energetically, maybe even spiritually?
For me, the landscape I observe is everything - it is the birthplace of silence, the moment where searches begin, those searches I often don’t know how to name. It’s not just the landscape itself, but how I position myself before what I see: how I quiet myself, how I calm down, how I surrender to that moment.
I believe that between what is observed and the observer there is no real distance it’s a space completed by our frequency, our energy. It’s also an act that somehow transforms you, even for that instant, into the person you want to be.
What is observed and the observer gain value through the how of observation- from what place it’s done. When I observe nature, I can see in it the most essential part of my being; logic and analysis do not enter here—love does, and my capacity to feel it.
When I see the sea, I feel its strength, and I feed on it while feeling it within me. It excites me and moves me because, in truth, it is inside me. It’s as if, in that act of observation, the most essential part of oneself appeared - became active.
That space between me and the tree is actually filled with my soul - there is no such space internally, even if externally it might seem so.
You’ve spoken about painting as a space to “remain suspended in observation.” In an age of relentless visual consumption, what do you believe slowness offers to both the viewer and the artist?
I think your questions are wonderful, and they’re all connected to a process that flows together, just as form and gesture need color, and the tree connects me with my own wisdom, allowing me to admire it in itself, the same applies here.
I believe slowness offers us more space, it gives us the stillness we need to connect with the most sacred and profound parts of ourselves. For the artist, slowness is essential to gradually understand their practice, because it’s not something you grasp merely by doing it, something begins to emerge, and giving yourself time to rescue that emergence is crucial to sustain it over time.
For the viewer, slowness matters because the work requires reflection after observation. And to reflect, we don’t just need to think; we need to feel and to see in a certain “way.”
Images are courtesy of the artist.