At YAM Gallery - Républiques by Carlos Araya Vargas: Memory, Territory and Displacement

By Staff Writer

Since 1990, Carlos Araya Vargas has lived and worked between Chile and France. This dual belonging is central to his painting, built from memory, territory and displacement — physical and emotional — linking urban experience to social transformation.

Artist, professor and art therapist in psychiatry, Araya has worked from Santiago and Paris to remote territories, where painting meets lived experience.For eight years he has developed a series on Aleppo: over thirty large-format paintings tracing war, loss of territory and resistance. Beyond Syria, the work dialogues with other histories of violence, including the Chilean dictatorship. Aleppo becomes shared memory to interrogate exile, identity and reconstruction. Shown at MAVI Santiago, Centre d’art contemporain de Fontenay-sous-Bois, Galerie Julio Paris and Galería 314 Santiago, the project now continues at YAM Gallery.

Its new stage, Républiques, starts at Place de la République — emblematic space of encounter and collective expression — and follows Canal Saint-Martin, Canal de l’Ourcq and Canal Saint-Denis. These waterways, crossed by water, people and goods, are narrative threads of a city in permanent transformation. The landscape is not neutral. Marked by history and infrastructures, it reveals contradictions.

Araya highlights migrant camps and improvised tents that alter urban perception.

Temporary yet profound, they signify displacement, precarity and resistance, but also solidarity and the capacity to rebuild life in adversity. Painting makes visible what the everyday gaze ignores.

The project draws on landscape tradition, from Velázquez’s to the contemporary metropolis. Paris and Saint-Denis appear as territories in motion.

Born in Chile 1966, trained at University of Chile and Sorbonne, co-founder of Contingencia Psicodélica, resident in Paris since 1990, 100+ exhibitions, Château Haut Gléon Prize 1998, Taylor grants, Grand Prix Renée Bernard 2025, and leading workshops at Ville Evrard Hospital since 2012.

Opening: Wednesday, October 14^th6:00 p.m. At YAM Gallery through November 2026

Memoria de las formas by Agustín Solórzano remains on view through November 2026, with a new work and renewed museography.