Europa contra Macondo en la obra del artista Gonzalo Fuenmayor
Europe Against Macondo in the Work of the Artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor
His new work has been inspired by the tension that exists between Colombian and foreign cultures.
By ANDRÉS ARIAS |
4:15 p.m. | April 17, 2015
"While studying in the United States, I felt that I had to create exotic, Caribbean-themed works in order to be accepted. I was the only Latino. However, I got tired of that reasoning, and I came up with the idea of looking at all that with irony, making fun of those stereotypes of what a Latino should be, and the Macondian image of the United Fruit Company came to mind. It was then that bananas came into my work," says the artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor (Barranquilla, 1977) on how he began to develop a body of work focusing on the banana, on which he has been working since 2002.
As it happens, a show focusing on this theme is opening this coming Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, under the title "Tropical Mythologies." This exhibition came about as the result of the SMFA Traveling Fellowship he had been granted, along with nine other artists, in 2013, which would allow him to travel to any place of his choosing for a period of time. Fuenmayor (who is the grandson of Alfonso Fuenmayor, one of the members of García Márquez's literary group of the early fifties) decided to spend a couple of months in the Amazon, where he researched the light, the sounds, and the images of the jungle.
When the fellowship ended, he didn't return immediately to Miami, where he's been living for the past seven years (he's been living in the United States since 1998), but, instead, he went to Barranquilla. He had something on his mind: He looked for huge Victorian chandeliers all over the city and took them to a banana plantation.
Then, he mixed the two together. He created aggressive compositions in which chandeliers and bananas seem to be part of the same system, as if the palm trees were street lamps or as if the chandeliers had come to life and were bearing fruit. He took pictures, recorded a video, and let himself go. Then, he made huge drawings focusing on the same question: What happens when European culture is forcefully imposed on the Caribbean, or when the Caribbean culture is imposed on Europe? Inspired by this question, he created works in which a bunch of bananas storms into a room at Buckingham Palace; a classical theater is suddenly filled with palm trees; or a luxurious, decadent chandelier lights up in the midst of the most Macondian of crops.
A Clash of Traditions
"This show, for example, allows me to talk about cultural clashes as well as of the tension that has existed throughout our history between our traditions and those that were forced upon us," said the artist, who has participated in Colombia's Fernando Botero Prize (2007), Artecámara in Artbo (2009), and in Bogotá's Fourth Two-Dimensional Art Show exhibitions, just to name a few.
Regarding the works to be exhibited, curators such as Álvaro Medina from Colombia and Miranda Lash from the U.S.A. have praised not only his discursive ability, but also his almost-Classical aesthetic and figurative qualities in times like these in which beauty sometimes matters little. "Beauty, as seen from a Romantic point of view, has always been one of my artistic obsessions," he said.
ANDRÉS ARIAS
For EL TIEMPO