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Cristobal Lehyt’s work Contra El día or Against the day, a title inspired by the novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon, engages with the idea of labor and translation. It began as a drawing of ‘faeneros’ or farmworkers. Inspired by manual labor and the plight of the workers, the artist then asks students to recreate the drawing. In this case, it is an act of translation twice removed, once from the workers, then from the artist. The result is the work here. The artist writes:
Imagining people working in the desert, in the North of Chile, while drawing some aspects of one’s projection is a tricky proposition, it is, at best, unclear. Maybe all that is left is the attempt and some misaligned and imagined connection.
These drawings were made in New York while thinking of Faeneros, people without any rights or protections, currently working in the mines of northern Chile. The paper drawings were initially shown in Santiago in 2022 and were later redrawn by me on a different gallery wall in 2023, also in Santiago. Now they are here, redrawn by gallery workers Ziwei Chen, Kelly Eno, and Sovah Woydack , who are currently NYU students. Their translation of the drawings speaks to distance as much as my attempt at imagining people with no rights working in the desert, drawing them through a process similar to automatic drawing, and then composing spaces for their interaction through thin lines.
Cristóbal Lehyt is a Chile-born, New-York-based artist working in a variety of media. He studied at Universidad Católica de Chile, Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. His work has been shown at the Carpenter Center, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Fundación Telefónica Chile, Or Gallery, Kunsthaus Dresden, Artists Space, The Shanghai Biennale, The Mercosul Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Queens Museum among others. He has created site specific works in cities that include Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona, Madrid, Beijing, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. He has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Art Forum Fellowship, Harvard University. His work is in numerous collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is an assistant professor at The Cooper Union.
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