Les choses qui échappent (The things that slip away) imbue as much importance as those we understand or join together.
In Marcos Avila Forero’s work, the artwork does not dwell only inside the « print » he decides to show, whether it is a film, a photography or a sculpture. For the artist, the site, the times of detection, observation, and dialogue, with the search for archives, make an intimate preliminary and necessary documentary.
« My work exists first and foremost where I do it. »
The photographies selection that constitute the third individual exhibition of Marcos Avila Forero at the Dohyang Lee Gallery impersonates the sketchbook or notebook that often comes along with his artworks in his exhibitions. These are the material of the off – camera and mark it. For documentary or journalistic purposes, if the exposed portraits also tell about the backstage of their creation, they are, above all, a tool to understand and grasp the context the artist made Estenopeícas rurales, restitution of the memory (2015) in: the Colombian countryside and the homecoming after a long exile of the inhabitants engaged in an organised fight – armed or not – to defend their rights of land.
In this work, the artist examines a question the peace treaty signature with the FARC addresses with more acuity, nowadays. Thus, he displays artworks that match each other about Colombian farmers and their armed struggle as part of individual exhibitions like Les Choses qui vibrent at Grand Café in Saint Nazaire or collective exhibitions like Medellín, une histoire colombienne des années 1950 à aujourd’hui, in Abattoirs de Toulouse where he notably shows, a triptych of Estenopeícas rurales.
The snapshots of Les Choses qui Echappent mark the time of reunions, after the exile, between housings, their surroundings and those who make them live. The intimate time fixed on the film will become the object of a perspective reversal, and the creation of historical depth inside the series Estenopeícas rurales. The houses themselves certify the existence of those exiles that became like ghosts. The portraits exposed here testify of a retrieved presence for what the series tries to render the sporadic character. How to create and summon the history of an absence from the presence…
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Information
Dohyang Lee Gallery
73-75 rue Quincampoix 75003 Paris, France
October 17, 2017 to November 25, 2017
