Artists: Pedro Alcántara, Maria Isabel Arango, Ever Astudillo, Carlos Bonil, Richard Harrison Bravo, Antonio I. Caro, Carlos Castro, Ximena Díaz, Fernell Franco, Gonzalo, Fuenmayor, Adrian Felipe Gaitán, Fernando García, Ramiro Gómez, Cristo Hoyos, Miguel Kuan Bahamón, Guillermo Marín Rico, Norman Mejía, Ana Maria Millán, Camilo Pachón, Carlos Egidio Moreno Perea, Popular De Lujo (Gonzalo Díaz, Arnulfo Herrada), Sandra Rengifo, Yeisón Riascos, Maria Isabel Rueda, Adriana Salazar, Alfonso Suárez, Victor Alfonso González Urrutia & Giovanni Vargas
Exhibition title: Gótico tropical, variaciones de la luz en otras dimensiones
Organized by: Usurpadora, Puerto Colombia with Jim Fannkugen
Venue: Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Date: October 7 – December 30, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
From October 07th till December 30th, 2017, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain presents an exhibition of colombian historical and contemporary art pieces with the ambition to raise a sensitive and transgenerational panorama of the Gótico tropical movement which was and remains a unique cultural and artistic experience as intriguing as specific for Colombia.
In the second half of the XXth century, Colombia is heavily touched by violence. Very singular aesthetic characters appears in that context. Mentalities change, dreams and fantasies free themselves, ideas are publicly declared, new artistic forms appear. The violent break of social balance in Colombia forces a collective reconfiguration of wonders and hopes that the Gótico tropical delivers a monstrous vision.
Born in the 1970s from a circle of intellectuals called Grupo de Cali, this artistic adventure raises cannibalism and vampirism at the rank of recurrent motives of a literary and cinematographic new wave. In the deeply South American tradition of tropicalism and in the social and subversive aspirations of the time, Andrès Caicedo, Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo or Hernando Guerrero devote themselves through experimentation, critic and pleasure, to a transcultural appropriation of “Gothic” aesthetics.
As an esthetic and identity revolution, the Gótico tropical finds contemporary filiations in a Colombian emergent scene which stretches well beyond the city of Cali but remains nevertheless resolutely rooted in Colombian culture. Contemporary visuel artists use the same passion for fantastic and disturbing aesthetics of exotic folklore as vectors of cultural revendication.
This exhibition is part of an exchange program between Passerelle and La Usurpadora (Colombia), initiated in 2014 within the collaborative platform FRACO which paid a tribune of Colombian artist Luis Ernesto Arocha, through various shows in French institutions in summer 2015 (Frac des Pays de la Loire -Carquefou, Frac PACA – Marseille, La Maison rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert – Paris, La Halle des Bouchers Centre d’art contemporain – Vienne and Passerelle -Brest). This collaboration made also possible for young French Artist Anaïs Touchot to have a 3 months residency and a solo show in Puerto Colombia in Spring 2017 as part of the Year France-Colombia 2017.
LA USURPADORA
The Usurpadora is an independent contemporary art platform created in 2012 in Puerto Colombia (Atlántico, Colombia) by Maria Isabel Rueda and Mario Alberto Llanos Luna, to promote and disseminate works of emerging artists in the region . Far from artistic and institutional capitals, such as Cali and Bogotá, their project is based on the research and valorisation of artists who offer an authentic vision of Caribbean art in this region that was once one of the most emblematic of Colombia.
As an omadic space, La Usurpadora temporarily takes possession of places. As a creator of networks and a reflection of the dynamic processes that animate the art of today, La Usurpadora also develops a residency program, generating meetings between local, national and international artists.
