The concept of the Invisible Work arose from my own definition of art, developed between 1983 and 1986. Despite warnings about the difficulty of such an endeavor, I decided to proceed, recognizing the challenge. I titled this definition Teorema de 1986, and it represents the tip of the iceberg of my interest in the notion of the appearance of work as a creative and research area. It reads as follows:

Art is a state of consciousness derived from a making with a low refractive index.

Invisible Work is a painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, photograph, video, film, installation, performance, or any other type of work that your biases consider not to be art. It is a work that exists in the "blind spot" of the viewer.

Between 1987 and 1993, I wrote nine guidelines for identifying and creating Invisible Works, which I titled Tercera Internacional Neopompier. Since then, these guidelines have regulated all my artistic endeavors.

For a work to be Invisible, it must:

Each of these nine rules grants 11.1% invisibility, which means that a fully achieved Invisible Work is one that has 0.1% visibility.

Then, between 1993 and 1998, I decided to compile Invisible Works into three sections, which I called Variaciones Frenhofer:

Classic Invisible Work: A category rooted in the tradition of empty spaces and monochrome surfaces. It is not absence, but sublimated presence. Here, invisibility manifests as a form of visual asceticism, an extreme purification that challenges the limits of perception and representation.
Baroque Invisible Work: This variant, seemingly in contradiction with the former, aligns with the paradoxical nature of process art. In this case, invisibility does not arise from subtraction, but from proliferation. It is the vertigo of self-referentiality taken to the extreme, where the work hides within the labyrinth of its own creative process.
Perfect Invisible Work: This category, the most elusive, adheres rigorously to the Tercera Internacional Neopompier decalog. It is less a work than a conceptual horizon, a vanishing point toward which the other variations tend, without ever fully reaching it.

Arturo Cariceo Zúñiga *


  • (Santiago, 1968) Painter and academic at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile. He obtained his degree in Visual Arts and a Master in Visual Arts from the University of Chile, as well as his professional title as a painter. He continued his studies in Cultural Criticism at the ARCIS University of Art and Social Sciences, a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Chile, and a PhD in Research at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. He holds the thesis of Artistic Singularity. His research and creative focus is on the notion of the appearance of artwork, calling all his artistic endeavors "Invisible Work," using a wordplay between the cultural category "work of art" and the economic metaphor "Invisible Hand" by Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. He has curated retrospectives of painters José Balmes, Ramón Vergara Grez, and Matilde Pérez, as well as filmmakers Ignacio Agüero and Carlos Flores del Pino. He has edited the books "Ser Digital: Manual de supervivencia para conversos a la cultura electrónica" by José Ramón Alcalá and "Derroteros y naufragios del arte contemporáneo" by Fernando Castro Flórez. He is the author of the monographs on Latin American artists Osvaldo Salerno and Matilde Pérez. He created the electronic platform for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile. His work has been exhibited at the Chile Triennale (dedicated to the country’s bicentennial), the Young Art Biennale, the Cuenca Biennale, the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (GAM), the Museum of Tajamares, the Museum of Modern Art of Korea (MOCA), the Extremadura and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC), the Mausoleum Museum of Morille, the Anthropological and Contemporary Art Museum (MAAC), Amós Salvador Hall, Animal Gallery, Gabriela Mistral Gallery, Metropolitan Gallery, XS Gallery, Quarentena Gallery, Posada del Corregidor Gallery, Blanca Soto Gallery, and art and music festivals such as SOS4.8 (Spain) and 404 (Argentina), among others. He has been exhibiting his work on the internet since 1995.

Contacto: cariceo@uchile.cl
linktr.ee/arturocariceo