This sheet from 2023 gathers a loose congregation of bodies on white paper. A large head in profile anchors the lower center, built from mauve, rose, and slate blue, its eye left in reserve so that the bare paper looks out from inside the figure. Above it hovers a single hand, painted with a naturalist's care that nothing else on the sheet is granted; around it, bodies come apart. A standing figure at the left edge darkens from a multicolored head through a brown torso before ending in a spill of red at the foot. At the right, a curled body floats free, its long hair drawn out into wet strands. Poblete works wet-into-wet, and the blooms and hard drying lines record how long each pool of color was allowed to move before it settled.

Watercolor is the center of Poblete's practice, and she uses it against its reputation. A medium long associated with the preparatory and the polite becomes, in her hands, the carrier of the work's meaning: pigment released into water will not hold a contour, and the resulting bleed is how she pictures identities that refuse to stay inside the lines drawn for them. The figures here are neither fully human nor fully iconic. They descend from the Virgins, braids, and votive emblems that populate her larger sheets, where Marian devotion and Andean cosmology share the same water.

The work belongs to the moment of Poblete's international emergence. It was included in Guaymallén, the exhibition that followed her selection as Deutsche Bank's Artist of the Year 2023, shown at the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin and then at MUDEC in Milan, and it is illustrated in the accompanying Kerber catalogue. In 2024 the artist received a special mention at the 60th Venice Biennale, where the jury singled out her critical engagement with colonial representation from a trans Indigenous perspective. Born in Guaymallén, Mendoza, in 1989 to a family of Bolivian heritage, Poblete has made her adopted name a reclamation: chola, a slur aimed at Andean women, worn as a title.

What distinguishes this sheet within that trajectory is its restraint. Nothing is crowded; each figure keeps its margin of white, and the drama happens at the edges, where color either stops cleanly or runs. The red at the standing figure's foot is the sheet's bluntest incident, a stain that exceeds the body it belongs to. Poblete has said she does not believe in healing, and the drawing takes her at her word. It leaves its marks open.