We share the press release from the newspaper EL TIEMPO about the new exhibition by Jaime Ávila. Here the original link.
“The electric light at night makes the city’s limits visible. It is a sensor that determines the limits of the city’s colonization,” says Jaime Ávila (Saboyá, 1966), who presents ‘Ciudad perdida’, at Nueveochenta, in Bogotá.
The tour begins on the first floor, with pieces that allude to the geography of Ciudad Perdida – whose original name is Teyuna – and to its inhabitants, the Kogui indigenous people. All the pieces, except for a few drawings, are mostly black and white landscapes.
There are aerial and night views of imagined or known cities that he creates from his imagination, without using previous photos or sketches. No humans appear – except in the first pieces and in the drawings where the artist placed a Kogui making three movements and, in the background, some maps that he found in an atlas, where names of places appear that have changed today.
This is where Ávila's reflection begins to unfold. He has always been interested in approaching geography and the urban. Colonization seen not only from the past but as a continuous process that is also expressed in words. That is why, in three of his pieces, fictional places appear that have proper names: Serranía de Juan, Llanuras de Julio or Riachuelos de Victoria. These names represent, in addition to the reminiscence of the Spanish conquest, the way in which the countryside and even the oceans have begun to become private property.
In another of these, names also appear, but they are no longer Spanish but 'gringo'. "From the 70s onwards and because of the movies, many people began to be baptized with gringo names and it is common to have a family member or friend with a name like that," adds the artist.
In the larger paintings, the reflection on the city and its boundaries appears no longer in the form of text but in drawings made with Indian ink, acrylic and a substance called pyroxylin, which is used to fix, for example, the paint on cars. “It is a reflection on the earthly, that is why there are no stars in the sky,” he says, pointing to one of the works, in which he recreated the mountains of Bogotá.
Where and when?
'Lost City' will be open to the public until September 10, at Nueveochenta. Diagonal 68 No. 12 – 42. Bogotá. Phone: 649-5478.
CULTURE AND ENTERTAINMENT
