The past is never dead. It’s not even past. General view at Museo Arte Moderno Bogota MamBO
Columbus Egg/bollock (1897 – 2024) Bronze and rubber ball. From a Césare Sighinolfi. Sculpture
The past is never dead. It's not even past. This infamous William Faulkner quote, borrowed for the title of Carlos Castro Arias' exhibition, reflects both the artist's and the writer's beliefs in the enduring significance of history and how it continues to exert its influence on the present.
Faulkner's motto also perfectly resumes the research of the Bogota-born, San Diego-based conceptual multimedia artist Carlos Castro Arias, who has built a distinctive practice for over twenty years. He employs through different media a "cynical aesthetics" (Michel Onfray) that projects a skeptical perspective on culture, art, and societal norms.
Castro Arias short-circuits heterogeneous elements to create a morbid kaleidoscope of references, which hybridizes past and present, cultured and popular, myth and reality, sacred and profane. This approach also engages with an "archaeological approach to the present" (Giorgio Agamben), interpreted as a way of quoting the past to question the present. A strategy the artist adopts to examine how historical events and ideas have shaped the Colombian political and social landscape.
Castro Arias often evokes traditional artistic genres connected to the Western art historical tradition, like tapestry, commemorative painting, and sculpture. He subverts the linguistic codes of his aristocratic historical references to narrate the contradictions and vulgarity of the present, underlining, with an attitude suspended between humor and cynicism, Colombian society's paradoxes, myths, and rites.
The exhibition contextualizes new pieces specially conceived for this occasion with two existing series of works: Los Padres Ausentes (2021 - 2024) and Mythstories (2017-current). In both, Castro Arias plays with the ambiguously evocative power of images, proposing a corrosive vision of the most contradictory aspects of Colombian, and by extension, of contemporary society.
Los padres ausentes juxtaposes two different iconographies emblematic of two cultures that clashed in the Americas: the natives and the conquerors. Castro Arias adorns resin sculptures—replicas of original commemorative monuments—with traditional chaquiras [plastic beads], incorporating symbols from the Inga culture in Putumayo, Colombia. The paintings of the same series are connected to the phenomenon that has been questioned and debated surrounding colonial durabilities and legacies in recent years, which have become increasingly visible through the protests against colonial monuments all across the Americas, Australia, and Europe.
Mythstories draws inspiration from the 17th-century tradition of Gobelin woven tapestries, exquisite handcrafted masterpieces initially used to commemorate the lives and heroic deeds of European monarchs, in order to illustrate contemporary events in Colombia. By interlacing medieval imagery and some of the most notorious facts connected to recent national history, Castro Arias creates sumptuous compositions intertwining myth, history, and folklore.
Another recurrent theme in Castro Arias’ work is his attention to historical figures and foundational events, hijacking their appearance in order to question their current meaning. Such is the case for his obsession with the Catholic Monarchs, Cristopher Columbus, Luis Carlos Galán, or more prominently, Simón Bolivar. Diverting away from the representational canon as a heroic effigy, Castro Arias revisits several times the figure of “El Libertador” [The Liberator] across his career, finding incisive ways to dispute its grandeur in each one.
Is history really a "teacher of life", as Cicero's famous saying would suggest, or rather a teacher of doubt? What significance can we attribute to knowledge of the past? Can we attribute a cognitive value to history, which can help us better understand the present? The artist's answer to these thorny issues throughout the show is to explore divergent narratives, recuperating ignored or suppressed elements in historical and official accounts.
Eugenio Viola and Juaniko Moreno
Curators
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. General view at Museo Arte Moderno Bogota MamBO
Columbus Egg/bollock (1897 – 2024) Bronze and rubber ball. From a Césare Sighinolfi. Sculpture