La Chola Poblete

The present watercolor by La Chola Poblete emerges as an intricate, pulsating ecosystem of fragmented figures and spectral forms, suspended in the fluidity of their own becoming. Delicate yet forceful, the composition unfolds through translucent washes and saturated pigments, orchestrating an ethereal dance between dissolution and emergence. The figures—disembodied, intertwined, and amorphous—coalesce in a space where boundaries between self and other, flesh and spirit, human and divine, dissolve. The dominant profile, a spectral visage in a state of transformation, bears the weight of both history and possibility, its contours eroded by the chromatic seepage of time. Poblete’s handling of watercolor, with its inherent unpredictability and its capacity to stain, bleed, and pool, mirrors the instability of identity itself—fluid, porous, and eternally in flux.

This particular work exemplifies Poblete’s singular mastery of watercolor, a medium that, in her hands, transcends its traditional associations with delicacy and domesticity to become a site of radical intervention. Watercolor, often relegated to the margins of artistic hierarchies, is here wielded with a deliberate defiance, resisting containment and embracing accident as a conceptual strategy. The colors do not merely describe form but enact their own agency, seeping into one another with a quiet insistence that speaks to ancestral memory and the inescapability of history. In Poblete’s oeuvre, the Virgin Mary, the mestizo body, and the Andean cosmology are reconfigured through aqueous veils of color, complicating their iconographic legibility. This painting’s ambiguous anatomies—limbs unfurling like roots, heads morphing into specters—embody a narrative of hybridity and resistance, defying fixed categories of gender, race, and corporeal stability.

Positioned within the larger scope of Poblete’s practice, this work reaffirms her preoccupation with the colonial wound and its afterlives in the present. Her figures—neither wholly human nor wholly divine—speak to a postcolonial subjectivity haunted by the impositions of Western taxonomy and iconography. Echoing the traditions of Andean syncretic imagery, where Catholic saints absorb the visual language of indigenous spirituality, Poblete’s forms are mutable and insurgent, slipping between the sacred and the profane. Her work belongs to a lineage of Latin American artists who interrogate the legacies of conquest and displacement, yet her approach is distinctly personal, inscribing her own queer, indigenous, and gender-fluid identity into the very materiality of the work. The liquidity of watercolor becomes a metaphor for cultural and bodily transformation, a refusal of the rigidities of colonial classification.

This 2023 watercolor, then, is not merely an image but an event—an act of remembering, an invocation, and an offering. It invites us into a world where form is unmoored, identity is an ongoing negotiation, and the past seeps irrevocably into the present. Poblete’s vision is one of spectral beauty and quiet resistance, where paint behaves like memory: staining, eroding, and reconstituting the fragile architectures of the self. In a time when the politics of visibility are ever more contested, her work stands as an insistent whisper, reminding us that identity is not a fixed entity to be named, but a fluid becoming, endlessly remade in the tides of history and desire.