Spectacle and secrecy

Radenko Milak, Andrés Felipe Orjuela and Luis Fernando Peláez, share a thematic approach that plays between the spectacular and the enigmatic, hidden or clandestine. While their language of representations seems historical and realistic, the associations they evoke oscillate between dreamlike and phantasmagorical, playing with what is revealed in each image and what is hidden behind it.

In his watercolors, part of the 'Anthropocene' series, Milak continues his exploration of the urban environment. From the prying eyes of looking to others through their windows as if we live inside showcases, as in the game of closeness and strange familiarity of distant landscapes, falsified by the mass-media for the consumption of global tourism, his images pose a disturbing background of commodification and exclusion. The “spectacularity” of the contemporary city opens a reading of the metropolis as a scenario of extremes, between the banal and the monumental; The city understood as a swarm of cultures, identities and forms, is reminiscent of the Medusa, which cannot be looked in the eye. The panorama of São Paulo exemplifies the amazing panorama of contemporary times.

Using photographs and historical archives, Orjuela captures various actors who represent the abject, a category that refers, according to Julia Kristeva, to the horror produced by the loss of meaning caused by the absence of distinction between subject and object, between being and the other. Orjuela investigates the meaning of the socially marginal. Fighters, for example, incorporate the hidden and unnameable, adopting identities without identity, that which resists meaning.

Through wall sculptures, Luis Fernando Peláez has built a somber environment based on memory and personal experience. The traveler's cities, the farewells, the ghostly constructions under the moon, are testimony to a way of inhabiting the world poetically. His work evokes port landscapes, wineries in the moonlight and Buddhist temples at night in ancient cities.

Three views explore uncertain, latent, suggestive images: the city and its ghosts, contingent images that call us to attest to the spectacular and the secret in images that we look at and at the same time look at us.

Ana Patricia Gómez- Director