Esteban Peña is a color genius; the images of him are a pure hoax, are they photographs?, are they paintings? In Maleza, his new exhibition at the Nueveochenta gallery, all the questions crowd together and vanish in a second, because its flowers fill the space and leave new questions in the air: how long do we have left to live on the planet? How many living beings have we hopelessly destroyed?
Peña lives in the United Kingdom, the place where horticulture and botany are the closest thing to a religion. The English have always bragged about their countryside, but in real life they have little wildlife left, the great plains full of wildflowers have given way to big crops and their daffodils and daisies and shamrock blossoms are increasingly scarcer. Peña immersed himself in that world; he entered increasingly specialized catalogs and – like a detective – ended up facing endangered species. And, literally, he also began to see one of the most complex marriages in nature: that of flowers and insects.
(Also read: ‘I’m moved by Van der Weyden’s Descent’: David Manzur)
The colors that a bumblebee or a butterfly sees are not the same as those that we humans see; In an encyclopedic effort worthy of the legendary Baron Humboldt or adventurer Alfred Russel Wallace, Peña photographed the weeds he saw growing nearby and then subjected the photos to ultraviolet or ultra-red rays. And what he saw amazed him: the white that we see in three different flowers for insects is not a single white, but three different colors: they can see lilacs, oranges, a phosphorescent green. That bizarre and unknown vision of her moved her to painting. And here comes the deception.
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Peña’s large paintings are born from the colors of the printers: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. His works are born with an industriousness as impossible and as exciting as nature itself, layer after layer of paint, its flowers are born again on the paper and the viewers – by sheer enchantment – are trapped like an insect. Peña transforms into a human printer with her brushes and the colors of the insects, and she reproduces the images with shocking hyperrealism.
The exhibition becomes a delicious walk through the countryside; for the beauty of the undergrowth.
(You may be interested: Santiago Cárdenas made his Self-portrait for EL TIEMPO)
But in that walk, death also appears; In his research, Peña found hundreds of endangered flowers that, in a brilliant solution, he decided to paint as a black shadow on white paper. His paint is the deepest black that can be found on the market. And that unfathomable black reminds us that outside there is a whole world of colors -colors that we do not know and have not enjoyed- that, as in a Cortázar story, can brighten our lives.
Fernando Gomez Echeverri
Culture Editor EL TIEMPO
@CulturaET
2023-06-27 20:41:06
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