Loro Coirón

Thierry Defert was born in Paris on 29 April 1948. When he was three his family moved to Dakar, Senegal, where he grew up until the age of seventeen. In 1965 he returned to Paris to study at a graphic arts school, and in 1967 he entered the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.

In France Defert worked in illustration, design, poster making and advertising. He took part in the television programme Ouvrez les guillemets and in projects at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and between 1981 and 1989 he worked as a journalist for publications including Zoom, a magazine devoted to the image. In 1984 his book on the fashion illustrator Georges Lepape won the Elie Faure prize, and the same year he became head of the graphic design department at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, the French national school of industrial design.

In 1988 he travelled to Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn and visited Valparaíso for the first time. In 1995 he made his first sketches of Santiago and of Plaza Victoria in Valparaíso, and towards the end of the decade he settled in the port, setting up his home and studio on Cerro Cordillera.

There he developed the work for which he became known: linocuts and woodcuts, cut in linoleum, African okoume plywood and Chilean litre wood, depicting the life of the hills, the traditional trades and the people of the port in strong contrasts of black and white. He worked on a great fresco of the bay more than 300 metres long and four metres high. His work was shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Biblioteca Nacional, Matucana 100, the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, which mounted a show of more than a hundred works in 2020, and in exhibitions in Bayonne, Bobigny and Porto.

He believed popular art should reach the people it portrayed, saying that someone who draws the people of the street cannot show only in a luxury gallery. His images circulated widely as postcards and prints. During the Covid-19 pandemic he gave a drawing to the Hospital Carlos Van Buren in honour of its health workers.

Defert made Valparaíso his home from the late 1990s and lived and worked on Cerro Cordillera, one of the city's historic hills. He took his artistic signature from two Chilean nicknames: "loro", parrot, given by a friend because he talked so much, and "coirón", a tufted grass to which children compared his thick eyebrows.

Thierry Defert died on 23 October 2026, aged 78. His death was announced on 24 October by the Municipality of Valparaíso through its social media, and was reported by BioBioChile, ADN Radio, El Mostrador and The Clinic. The cause of death was not made public, and no details of a funeral or tributes had been announced at the time of the first reports. The municipality sent its condolences to his family and friends and wrote that his art would live on in every corner of the port.

Loro Coirón is remembered as one of the defining visual chroniclers of modern Valparaíso, a foreign-born artist whose images helped the city see itself. His prints remain on façades, in restaurants, cafés, hotels and homes across the port and abroad, and the Universidad de Playa Ancha keeps a collection of a hundred works he donated, with an archive devoted to his legacy.