Work of writers, no doubt. But also the work of painters since Greek Antiquity. When was Franco Salas Borquez, a Chilean artist now presented at the Center Cristel Éditeur d’Art in Saint-Malo, also exhibited at the Naval Museum of Madrid, the Naval Museum of Punta Arenas, the Yacht Club de France, the Museum of the citadel of Saint-Tropez, when did he realize that his work would be embodied in a continual encounter with the Pacific, the English Channel and the Atlantic? To ask the question is to return to the child, and imagine him on the boat of his father, sailor and shipowner, himself born of a brave captain. Not to mention other ancestors, bold navigators who gave the name of Salas to an islet in the Gulf of Penas. In short, heredity. Heredity, like a deep spring, to explain that this man is the only one to paint the sea as he paints it. A staggering development, a photograph, one would think, but taken from the sky, above the swirling, upright, entwined, raging waves. In the strict sense, an inimitable drawing, except to identify it with the famous skinned by Houdon. Because there is that in Franco Salas Borquez: an organic painting, showing the sea in its carnal, vibrant, milky truth – its muscles, its belly, its secret joints, its spasms, its jumps, its boos and the infinite play of her nerves… Should we conclude that Franco Salas Borquez, revealed at a very young age by his obvious gifts as a portrait painter, looks at her as if she were a woman? Perhaps… Unless he simply wants to warn, on a superheated planet, that the formidable matrix, which has provided everything, will reopen to swallow everything.
Abyssus abyssum invocat. The abyss calls the abyss.

Christophe Penot
Art editor