Los Restos

In Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela’s New Land series, photographs of desert scenes are transferred onto canvas, complemented by geometric panels that intersect like an exploded tesseract. The panes are transparent, tinted typically gray or white, with some at dramatic angles and others perfectly straight, as if we’re viewing them head-on. His images of the Atacama Desert portray “a vast and ’empty’ place riddled with ghosts and violent histories, as well as dreams and undifferentiated futures of possibility,” says a statement from Asya Geisberg Gallery, which presents several new works in the series in the artist’s current solo exhibition, Los restos.

Valenzuela begins his New Land paintings with a toner transfer process that requires several passes to build up multiple layers, adding and subtracting as he works. He captures the original images using a medium format camera, harkening back to 19th-century landscape photography that, in its earliest days, was naturally compared to landscape painting—the only way most people were able to see what distant lands looked like, whether from imagination or reality.

As technologies developed and photographers were able to produce multiple prints from a single negative, their images could be more widely distributed, tapping into the public’s hunger to see faraway locales. Many of these photographers were also employed by the government or for commercial purposes, so their images often served an industrial or socio-economic purpose related to the prospect of settlement or resource extraction. Nevertheless, these images capture astonishing views of remote places that were seeing immense and sometimes violent change as white settlers had expansion on the mind. Los restos also includes silver gelatin prints in another nod to this early documentary practice.

Valenzuela captures landscapes overlaid with abstract forms that appear to be in transition yet are simultaneously frozen in time. “This gesture of visual splicing enhances our awareness of the sublimity and transcendence of the space we are looking at, as well as the artifice and mythologizing we often fall into while gazing over this dreamlike land,” the gallery says.

The artist’s paintings are complemented by a suite of black-and-white photos of discarded objects in the desert titled Restos, meaning “remains.” We’re confronted with the immediacy of these out-of-place objects that seem to disrupt the pristine landscape; our attention is brought downward rather than outward to consider remnants of metal, vehicles, rubber, and other detritus. While the desert may feel empty, as our human scale is brought into glaring contrast, Valenzuela reminds us of its cycles of occupation, layered histories, and sacredness. All at once, and like Valenzuela’s work itself, the desert is fragmented, universal, open to interpretation, and deeply personal.

Los restos continues in New York City through October 18. ✧

Header image: New Land D09, 2025. Acrylic and toner on canvas, 60 x 48 inches.

All images courtesy of the artist and Asya Geisberg Gallery.