The Chilean painter Ernesto Barreda has offered forty-three exhibitions in the course of his extended career. The first one, in 1947, was a modest  display of temperas at what used to be the Bookstore Neira – in Santiago de Chile-  and the latest, recently inaugurated exhibition also in Santiago at the Tomás Andreu Gallery.

A fifty-three year long career, over half a century of painting, that is the background of this architect and artist, who has been qualified from 'the Zurbarán of doors’ to ' master of art and life. Decades of work that began with quasi-Cubistic  tints, then passed on to walls and doors, which opened the way to paintings of exuberant nature, then to exteriors and interiors, and now to pictorial quotes of the great Spanish painters. Barreda’s painting has evolved not only as regards his themes but also as regards the changing colors and his increasingly mysterious and evocative artwork.