Categories
Subjects
Authors
Artists
Venues
Locations
Calendar
Filter
Done
July 20, 2022 – Review
Daniel Otero Torres’s “Las huellas del viento”
Jayne Wilkinson
It’s a rare artist who combines deep research into histories of colonization with the technical draughtsmanship necessary for near-photographic expressive figuration. This is the kind of work for which Daniel Otero Torres—a Colombian artist based in Paris—has become known. His detailed, hyper-realistic drawings on large, flat sheets of steel or aluminum reproduce archival photographs by adjusting scale and composition to create the larger-than-life creaturely figures that populate his installations. Taking cues from archaeology, magical realism, and mythology, the works include many visual references that address pre-Columbian histories across Latin America. In his newest work for “Las huellas del viento” (the exhibition’s poetic title translates to “the traces of the wind”) Torres extends these concerns to the industrialization and financialization of nature, a complex topic handled here with nuance. The show comprises steel sculptures, a five-panel wall work, a hanging installation, and a series of ceramic vessels, with each group exploring a different natural commodity—bananas, corn, and poppies—that has been intensively mono-cropped and tightly controlled in order to produce corporate wealth rather than communal resources.
Bananas are one of the world’s most popular fruits, and not by accident. The United Fruit Company, a twentieth-century multinational corporation, is largely credited with developing …