I grew up surrounded by images.

My grandfather and father were amateur photographers. For a time, a bathroom in our home was turned into a darkroom for developing photographs. My mother was always doing crafts and later took up realistic painting, even running a small art school at home. Photography and painting were simply part of the world I grew up in.

I eventually entered that world through photography. Over the years, I also returned to cinema, working as a Director of Photography. I was drawn to light, space, atmosphere and movement. Alongside commercial work, I continued pursuing personal projects, looking for a way to express something I could feel but could not yet fully articulate.

The search was gradual.

In 2016, I returned to Chile after many years in Mexico and began looking for another way forward. I turned to cinema and developed personal film projects, but once again I found myself moving toward reduction. Fewer elements. Less dependence on circumstances and on other people.

This led me to The Origin, a photographic project developed over two years in Chilean Patagonia. I travelled alone through remote landscapes, working entirely in black and white. Returning to Chile had already meant returning to a personal origin. Patagonia became a way of going further, toward something more elemental.

And finally, I realized that photography would not take me where I was looking to go.

During a long period of stillness, when the world had slowed down, I began spending more time reading, with my family, and especially with my mother. We started talking about painting. I already knew I wanted abstraction and reduction. I had been working in black and white in photography, and I carried that language into painting.

In 2021, I began painting. I soon began to study the materials closely. Layers, water, mediums, drying times. Gradually, I discovered that I could construct an image from nothing. I could create the conditions and allow the image to emerge through the process.

I was drawn to the way forms seem to appear and disappear, as they do in clouds, or how a book can reveal something entirely different when read again years later. I wanted to create that instability within the painting, where what is seen can change simply through looking.

I knew what I wanted the paintings to look and feel like. What developed slowly was an understanding of what they could contain.

Layers became traces. Through the work, Memory, Time and Presence emerged as territories within the paintings.

The process can be difficult. There are days of uncertainty, frustration and doubt. Sometimes a painting seems to lead nowhere. Then, gradually, something comes together and I recognize it.

Each painting is also connected to the person I am while making it. The changes may be subtle. 

Beyond the paintings, there is a larger search.

Since childhood, I have felt a need to understand the world more deeply: what it means to be here, how we inhabit time, our relationship with others and with nature, and what may exist beyond what we can immediately see.

Painting has become a way of moving closer to these questions, to look more deeply, to remain attentive, and to allow something of their depth to emerge.

But the larger search continues.

SCHIFFRIN emerged from this journey.

It is a way of looking. A way of remaining with something long enough for it to change. A way of moving closer to what cannot always be seen.