Victoria Calleja was born in Viña del Mar – Chile – in 1958. She now lives and works in Belgium.
She is a graduate of the University of Chile in Plastic arts with distinction, and has also a diploma in monumental painting and engraving from the Royal Academy of Arts of Brussels.
She has been painting for twenty years. Her art answers a quest. Her paintings and sculptures explore the fusion of the shape and the space. She tries to discover and to depict this fusion of both constituent elements of her artworks: the subject and his own space.
The artist tells that “every painting is an opportunity to produce universes which escape from the central pictorial space. These universes are translated by independent, not codified zones, which work in an autonomous way but which belong to the whole painting. They bring a certain serenity; a space of meditation; certain mystery or strangeness".
In a paradoxical way, the character in my current paintings appears of profile, back or even face but at the same time refuses to give himself to the viewer. He is separated from the spectator by misted screens on which are reflected an unknown world. Thus, the spectator is allowed to throw on this screen his frustration of not being able to cross it completely. He cannot fully reach "the other one". So, he can also decide to tell his own story.”
The attractive power of her art consists in devoting to the poetic written forms of the images while keeping their part of mystery. To show while hiding is an obsession for the artist. Her drawings shy away from the immediate understanding; she prefers to cultivate a certain autism which denies any explanations for the benefit of mysterious presences in search of the sacred. Victoria Calleja‘s mind peregrinations gives to the translucent mysteries the most beautiful contemplative effects.
In the same spirit, the artist investigates in sculpture the problem of the transparency of bodies, of the volume hidden by the light. To this end, she uses plastics and metals with which she covers faces and bodies. Her sculptures thus arrayed themselves in a twinkling aura and a bright energy. The connection with the sacred is also evident here.