My current work consists of a series of oil paintings of landscapes, which have as their subject matter the Jungle, a series of portraits of baboons, urban landscapes and a series of wax sculptures of baboon heads.
My landscape paintings are invented images based on observation and memory. Through them I create an image that is not entirely fiction but rather a space in between experience and cognition. I am interested in painting reality as a conjecture of experience and memory, in which the final image has as much validity as the real experience; a testament to the subjective nature of our understanding of the world.
I first became interested in the Jungle as a subject matter upon reading 19th century accounts of travelers and their adventures in the jungles of Colombia and South America. I was fascinated by the places they described, and how their writings and prints came to inform a wider audience about unknown places. It was through these accounts that the world learned about a place in which all sorts of cultural projections defined new images of unknown territories. The subjective nature of the travelers’ accounts created a fictional space, which mirrored the culture that was looking at it.
Representations of nature in art ultimately become representations of a specific society looking at nature at a precise moment in history. My portraits of baboons in architectural settings are also based on this idea. The animal can only be understood as a projection of the human looking at it, and this mimetic action elicits an existentialist search for meaning through the painted image.
My current sculpture installation is composed of several baboon-like wax heads resting on poles. This piece references the impaled body of the conquered adversary. In this case the adversary is nature, as personified by the animal, but also the animal as a projection of the human. Aggressor and victim are both one, evincing the desire to turn “the other” into an object of silent contemplation in the futile hope of conquering it. |
