Eduard Moreno is a multifaceted artist whose interest in theory and philosophy distinguishes him in the Colombian art scene. It is not surprising, then, that the title is appropriated from an essay by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

A new series of paintings confronts us with diverse burning landscapes; burnings that produce an Andean forest environment where mist is also present. In the works, the image of the forest is accompanied, in a game of realism and abstraction, by the substrate that remains after the burning of the trees and grass, a mixture of earth, ash, vegetal material, sands and others. Let's say that the proof is there: in that quasi-black rectangle, the evidence left by the nature of its actions is captured. In the subtlety of the painting, we cannot define what happens in those landscapes of dawn or gray afternoon; we only know that the house burns.

But burning is also transformation and purification of matter. Is only to think of the rite of human cremation. Burning is part of the natural and evolutionary cycle in the chain of nutrient creation. But also, combustion obeys to the expansion of agricultural frontiers, to the extraction of wood and coal, as well as witnessing the upheavals produced by climate change.

For Agamben, the house is both language and the world we inhabit. Moreno is right to point out, through this medium, that the artist is no stranger to the world he inhabits. His ancestors, linked to the land for several generations, inspire him to link this work to the idea of pagamento. To give back, to pay homage, to recognize these ties, is the reason for the pagamentos. It is to open the understanding to a game of planes, spiritual and shamanic, where energy moves between different levels, not necessarily open to our perception.

Likewise, the 'amarres', different landscapes printed in charcoal and linked by copper rods, speak of this need to recognize in the soil, in nature, that realm of the natural and supernatural that was born with our ancestral cultures and is our legacy. Copper, associated with the idea of the perpetual movement of energy, carries a message that refers to this exchange, to the elimination of excess, to the esencial energetic transference, ecological and economic energy, fundamental to maintain a balance between beings and living forces.

Copper reappears in the form of plates recovered from electronic boards. On them are painted potatoes in various stages of germination. Recalling the Argentinian conceptual artist Víctor Gripo, Moreno points out that the potato, whose cultivation in America dates back 10,000 years, is the magical American ingredient that colonized Europe. As well as marking a return to the landscape, framing it in copper strips, painting the potato, altering our daily relationship with the food, is a form of homage to that which is pure and springs from the earth without apparent effort.

The house is burning everywhere. This is a metaphor for a 'society of the present' that does not know the limits of its actions. For Agamben, the only ones who can call themselves contemporary are those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, so that they can better observe the shadows in the lights, and finally the absolute darkness that surrounds us.

Ana Patricia Gómez - Directora