"The absence of colour in Peñaloza's work is reminiscent of Bosch's depiction of the world in the folding panels of his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, also without characters, also desolate. The grisaille emphasises this sense of despair and drama, reminding us also of Francisco de Goya's series of engravings The Disasters of War."
Daniel Silvo, director of Galería Nueva.
Ensamblajes Territoriales [Territorial Ensembles] emerges as the result of my forays into the demonstrations that have taken place since 18 October 2019 in Santiago, Chile.
In these explorations, I use the camera to capture certain events during the gatherings of demonstrators in different parts of Santiago, which are used as model-images that preserve fleeting moments amidst a context of tension. I photograph barricades, rubble and places decimated by the action of demonstrators to point them out as vestiges of social discontent. They are vestiges that refer to the discontent, fragmentation and violence that flow through these anonymous bodies protesting amid the territories.
Thus, these photographs are used to relate affectively to the captured instant, reinterpreting it through painting. Returning to painting and the painter's craft is a quest to use the effect and affection that painting gives us in its contemplation, to take advantage of its material properties in both formal and informal techniques for pictorial creation.
Painting and its multiple forms of production and registration affect the final interpretation of the model-image, producing canvases whose form and content swing between sharpness and diffusiveness, subtracting, through the painting, the human presence from the original photograph, directing attention to the alteration of the landscape and the objects in it by the action of man. The model-image becomes a gesture through painting; reinterpreting the concrete and abstract content of the image through colour, stain and line.
Ensamblajes Territoriales is a project that gives a platform to the images documented in a fractured and socially polarised territory, reinterpreted to point out that action of the demonstrators as a hiatus that deconstructs and restructures the territory.
Johans Peñaloza
GALERÍA NUEVA
C/ Doctor Fourquet, 10
28012 Madrid, España
Phone: +34 667054485
Tuesdays to Fridays, from 11 am - 2 pm, and 4.30 pm to 7.30 pm
Saturdays, from 11 am - 2 pm.
