The most recent works (2014 - 2016) by Manuel Bernardo Rojas are shaped from the accumulation and transformation of elements that he collects, groups, and alters through drawing, depending on his mood, the moment, and the place, as a playwright recreates imaginary beings that gather or scatter, migrating in meaning among the pages of Books colored with natural pigments, through the museum's architecture, or in wall fragments of diverse origins and contexts. Small fragments of ruins in a world full of waste that transmute into stories reassembled in the exhibition space, precariously but coherently reconstructing narrative scenes in which these different moments come into contact.
The most recent works (2014 - 2016) by Manuel Bernardo Rojas are shaped from the accumulation and transformation of elements that he collects, groups, and alters through drawing, depending on his mood, the moment, and the place, as a playwright recreates imaginary beings that gather or scatter, migrating in meaning among the pages of Books colored with natural pigments, through the museum's architecture, or in wall fragments of diverse origins and contexts. Small fragments of ruins in a world full of waste that transmute into stories reassembled in the exhibition space, precariously but coherently reconstructing narrative scenes in which these different moments come into contact.
Manuel draws on materials laden with history that viewers reconstruct as characters in a novel: abandoned nests, machetes of the indigenous guard of Toribío, of a vegetarian hunter in Puerto Nariño, of a worn-out harvest in La Mesa de los Santos, of sugar cane monoculture in the valley, a handmade family model 63 shotgun from Samacá, drawings of pandas in classic cars taken from encyclopedias, each with its own stories, placed in peculiar situations coming together or scattering, using the scale of small formats in large spaces to create tension and a temporal scale. Contrasts of time, scenes that, despite being small and fixed, unfold expansively in the viewer across different times and contexts, from which his characters emerge in stagings charged with drama, generating a whole rain of meaning.
The show opens on November 17 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, and will be open to the public until December 14, 2016 .
Guillermo Marín
Guest Curator