2018 COLLECTION: AS HUMAN, KNOWLEDGE

As Human, Knowledge marks a decisive moment in Arís’ trajectory: the passage from philosophical inquiry to visual thought. These pastels do not illustrate concepts; they stage the act of thinking itself. Young women appear absorbed in inner reflection, inhabiting a suspended temporality where attention, memory, and anticipation coexist.

Trained in philosophy across Chile, Argentina, and Belgium, Arís confronted early the limits of academic discourse as a space for free thinking. Visual art emerged not as an alternative language, but as a necessary one — a site where thought could slow down, acquire material resistance, and unfold beyond purely conceptual form.

Working with soft pastels on paper, Arís develops an embodied approach to cognition. Flesh becomes the primary site of meaning: warm, vulnerable, perceptive. The raw paper remains visible, asserting the provisional nature of thought itself — always in formation, always at risk of being erased. These works propose thinking as a lived experience rather than an abstract operation, reconnecting knowledge with presence, attention, and human intimacy.

The simultaneity of phases
2018 Collection: As Human, Knowledge
Verónica Arís Zlatar
Pastels on paper, 60x90cm.

In The Simultaneity of Phases, a woman withdraws into a moment of concentrated awareness. Her face and skin are rendered with care and density, while her body dissolves into unfinished marks. The image stages a tension between the persistence of the lived body and the fleeting nature of thought.

Subtle inscriptions—letters, lines, fragments—hover within the composition, not as explanations but as traces of reflection. The pastel functions simultaneously as artwork and manuscript, a surface where the gestures of painting enact the formal exploration of consciousness. Time here is not linear. Past, present, and anticipation coexist in a single experiential field. The figure does not think about time; she inhabits it.

The work invites slow looking. What initially appears as a serene portrait gradually reveals itself as a psychological, temporal, and conceptual landscape, where presence is constantly negotiated. The image holds an unresolved balance between clarity and disappearance, mirroring the fragile coherence of conscious experience.

On retention
2018 Collection: As Human, Knowledge
Verónica Arís Zlatar
Pastels on paper, 60x90cm.

On Retention operates as both artwork and philosophical manuscript. The pastel surface functions as a thinking field: a blackboard where a formal proposition emerges alongside the portrait. The work opens with the phrase “Grasping an identity ‘x’ in S…”, followed by a formulation written in the language of formal logic.

The drawing articulates a structure conceived by the artist to address the double intentionality of retention: the trace of what has just passed and the activation of prior acquisitions—patterns, categories, habitualities—through which experience remains identifiable as it unfolds. These operations are not explained, but inscribed.

Figure and formula coexist. The woman does not illustrate a theory; she inhabits the moment in which thought is being formalized. Image and notation converge, leaving the trace of a thinking process that remains open, provisional, and alive.

Phases and Kinesthesias
2018 Collection: As Human, Knowledge
Verónica Arís Zlatar
Pastels on paper, 60x90cm.

In Phases and Kinesthesias, a woman meets the viewer’s gaze while initiating a subtle movement, as if caught at the precise moment when perception becomes action. Her body is not posed but engaged: thinking through motion. Surrounding her, the traced coordinates of a single vanishing point appear—not as an academic demonstration, but as a conceptual framework unfolding within the image itself.

The work questions the nature of spatial understanding. Is linear perspective a learned system, acquired through cultural training, or does it arise implicitly from embodied experience—through balance, movement, and kinesthetic awareness, as in dance? Here, space is not constructed from a distant, objective viewpoint, but grasped from within the body that inhabits it.

The pastel operates simultaneously as image and diagram. The perspectival lines do not explain the figure; they resonate with her movement, suggesting that perception and orientation emerge from the same source. Vision, posture, and motion converge into a single act of apprehension.

Rather than illustrating a theory, Phases and Kinesthesias stages an inquiry. The image holds open a space where geometry becomes lived, and where the body itself appears as the primary site through which space is known.