From the artists’ first series ‘Expedición Extinción’ (2008-2011) to his most recent one ‘Futura Historia Natural’ (2024), Monsalve finds in the scientific ways of representation a language that he has explored from its graphic and pictorial richness, but mainly, from the idea of bringing methodological processes of science, such as botanical and biological classification, to the poetic and fictional art fields. In this intersection, the material or the pigments the artist uses (in this case, petroleum and mineral coal) contain all the symbolic and conceptual content of his work and become the hinge that allows him to move between these two types of knowledge. 

Petroleum and coal are two elements produced by nature, however they are derived in greater proportion from the fossil sediments of extinct animal species that inhabited our planet. In this series of drawings, time ceases to be linear and becomes spiral, because the animal that will not exist in the near future is made from the remains of the animal that no longer exists. This is how the construction of the image is assumed as a mediator between the past and the future, or better, as the artist says: “in a melancholic image of an imminent future”. 

The image that Europeans had of a rhinoceros for almost 200 years was the one created by Dürer, which he drew from sketches and descriptions, without ever having seen this animal. This fantastic, mythical, and somehow phantasmagoric figure can be transferred to the series ‘Animalario celeste’, the other project that is part of the exhibition, in which Monsalve depicts maps and constellations. Derived from an artifice, a series of polaroid photographs are presented as credible images of celestial maps. 

As well as in the drawings, what extinction leaves behind are the remains of matter; with the stars, the only thing we can see from Earth is the brightness after their demise. Terrestrial and celestial animals can be seen in the reflection of the midnight blue, right when the day ends and the night falls.