For their third Christmas exhibition Shire Pottery Gallery and Studios presents paintings in oil on canvas, pastels, and drawings from Chilean artist Enrique Azocar, along-side engraved glass by Peter Furlonger and hand thrown studio porcelain by Ivar Mackay. I lived under a very oppressive regime...artists were not allowed to talk freely, so there was not much feedback. Many things on TV were censored...I have done things since living here that I couldn't do at home or that would have taken me five years to organise.
Born in Concepción, Chile in 1960, and growing up in a country where at the time social, political and ideological freedoms were denied its people, Enrique Azócar followed a conventional university training and career in business management before dissatisfaction with his channeled existence led him to seek to express his creative ideologies through art. In 1986 he began to study painting at the studio of Andrés Baldwin in Santiago.
Leaving Chile was a requisite decision for an artist, whose need to vent a richly poetic view of the ‘realist’ genre which preoccupied him as a painter, led him to work and study in various studios in New York and London, gravitating eventually towards the select professors of Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design.
Since settling in Northumberland with his wife Anne, Enrique Azócar has exhibited with the Albemarle Gallery in London and the Sampling Foundation whilst maintaining his links with galleries in North America, Canada and Chile.
Marriage and children have softened his vision and in this exhibition we see elements of security and fecundity which carry a special resonance for Enrique Azócar, When you are deprived of freedom, life is very dark. In my paintings, light represents hope. The light of God illuminates the soul and from it you achieve your abundance, your creative ideas.
Using iconography common to many realist painters - domestic objects, fruits and vegetables, the landscape - Enrique Azócar transforms his still life subjects into eloquent productions that neither obscure nor objectify. His calm, attentive vision concentrates on elements of symbolism and meaning, taking aesthetic advantage of a filtered gaze that finds substance in the surrounding world whilst overcoming the obviousness of mere imitation.
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