WHEN PROGRESS COMES TO A HALT
Johans Peñaloza — La Ilusión del Dominio [The Illusion of Control]
In La Ilusión del Dominio, Johans Peñaloza presents a new series of paintings based on images of crashed and abandoned cars, where car bodies and vegetation silently contend for space. Two bodies of opposing natures come into contact: one industrial, rigid, and inorganic; the other living, changing, and expansive. Conceived for movement, the automobile appears here immobilized and stripped of its function, while vegetation breaks through its remains, penetrates its structures, and alters its surfaces.
This series continues an investigation into the transformations of territory that has been present in Peñaloza’s practice since Territorial Assemblages. Violence, power, and relations of control run through a painting practice that has progressively turned its attention toward the tensions between different forms of matter and the forces acting upon them. On this occasion, Peñaloza works from online images that have circulated as records of accidents, news images, viral photographs, or documentation of abandoned vehicles. Separated from their original contexts, these images reach the artist as vestiges of past events: they retain evidence that something occurred, even as their histories become increasingly uncertain.
This tension is also evident in the painting itself. Peñaloza constructs his images through layers, stains, impasto, and lines that distinguish each material's qualities: vegetation emerges through dense, diffuse brushstrokes, while the rigidity of metal is defined through impasto and dry lines. The machine's apparent solidity thus confronts the persistence of living, expansive matter.
La Ilusión del Dominio does not necessarily imply the victory of nature over the machine. Within this unstable coexistence, Peñaloza questions the permanence of what we believe we can control. The automobile, an emblem of a modernity that placed its faith in technology as an instrument of progress, autonomy, and control over territory, now appears as a remnant of that aspiration. What once seemed solid and stable is exposed to forces and temporalities that exceed human will. Through an archaeology of the present, the painting examines these remains and the enigma of an absence that emerges among them.
