Cartographies of Matter proposes a journey through the material diversity that permeates contemporary artistic practice in Latin America. Through the work of Ariel Cabrera, Sair García, Azull Martínez, Oscar Murillo, Darío Ortiz (1968), Carlos Vega, and Gustavo Vélez, a plural map is configured where historical memory, formal experimentation, and the power of matter as an expressive agent converge. Each of these artists, from their unique perspective, addresses questions that go beyond the aesthetic realm to enter a territory where the political, the cultural and the symbolic intersect. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a window into a visual laboratory in which materiality—oil, acrylic, steel, marble, bronze—is not simply a medium, but a protagonist that carries traces, tensions and possibilities.
Oscar Murillo’s (1986) work moves in the realm of the gestural: his canvases, laden with traces of everyday life, spray paint and oil, show how painting can be both an aesthetic surface and an expression of collective identity. A native of La Paila, Valle, he graduated from the University of Westminster and the Royal College of Art in England. Influenced by artists such as Dieter Roth and Franz West, his work has been recognised in global contemporary art circles for over a decade. In contrast, Ariel Cabrera’s (1982) paintings depict scenes that play with historical fiction, the fragmentation of memory and theatricality, generating narratives that engage in dialogue with the pictorial tradition while simultaneously reworking it.
For his part, in the works of Carlos Vega (1972), the history of modern art is cited, reconfigured under a critical and ironic gaze: Frida Kahlo, Picasso, and Cubism become revisited icons that remind us that the museum and modernity are also arenas of symbolic dispute. In a different way, Sair García (1975) turns stainless steel into a metaphor for the Magdalena River and the Ciénaga Grande. The ornate stilt houses of Nueva Venecia fill their surfaces, transforming the support into an expressive and conceptual medium. We would be far from thinking that those almost idyllic scenes, as if suspended in time, speak to us poetically of a terrible event: the massacre carried out in 2000 by paramilitary groups.
A su vez, Darío Ortiz (1968), con su figuración alegórica, ofrece narrativas que evocan lo clásico, pero siempre desde un lugar de enunciación contemporánea, donde los cuerpos y las escenas adquieren un carácter derivativo entre lo histórico, lo íntimo y lo social. Azull Martínez construye composiciones cromáticas que fragmentan y recomponen, que oscila entre lo onírico, lo arquitectónico y lo orgánico, pero también entre lo figurativo y lo abstracto.
Finally, Gustavo Vélez (1975), with his sculptures, restores an aura of monumental dynamism to the material. Marble, steel and bronze become undulating bodies, presenting cracks and shapes that attribute movement and refer both to classical tradition and to a contemporary world in transformation. Taken together, the works gathered in C art o gr af í as d e l a mat eri a form a dialogue between past and present, between tradition and rupture, between permanence and transformation. What is presented here is not a sum of individualities, but a Latin American mapping of expanded territory where each piece is linked to the others, thus revealing art’s capacity to challenge, question and reinvent the visible.
Text by:
Laura Páez
Art historian
