The development of contemporary art in Chile has had to contend with a dual condition as visual arts as well as procedure, that is to say: a modernization at the level of aesthetic language (based on reformations in visual art, and in formal terms) corresponding with modernity in a political and social context (the latter being represented from the 60's until 1973 by ideological speech - compromised, revolutionary or utopian). As has been labeled by local history, this process is subject to be recognized in the relations between visual avant-garde and political avant-garde, as characterized by the field of visual arts depicted in the works of the group Signo (Jose Balmes, Gracia Barrios, Eduardo Martinez Bonati and Alberto Perez), and other works produced some time later by Francisco Brugnoli, Virginia Errazuriz, Guillermo Nunez and Juan Pablo Langlois, among others. The expansion of the discussion of art into the political arena had, through the use of its subject matter (social and daily), through references extracted from the language of communication, and through the occupation of public areas, very incisive and aesthetic resources. In this way, a questioning of the institutional art foundation (as represented by the tradition of Chilean paintings) served as a metaphor for criticism of inequalities experienced in political and social context and realized in a conflicting and divergent manner between an open critique surrounding its inherited formal conditionings and the need to illustrate imposed speech by the political ideology.