Three Colombian Views in Japan
(Main Bar and Sushi Bar)

Saturday 1 May to Friday 4 June 2010

The exhibition Three Colombian Views in Japan was first assembled to help celebrate the centenary of the 1908 establishment of relations between Colombia and Japan. This exhibition features a trio of prominent figures in Colombian photography: Adriana Duque, Carlos Duque and Fernando Cano. Each artist presents a different perspective on his or her individual environment, offering an expression of photographic space in a language common to all: the image.

Adriana Duque captures in her photographs instances of myth, reality, and fantasy. In her compositions one can intuit the results of a perverse summary, which navigates among social contrasts typical of a national reality, as well as scenarios which touch neo-surrealism. These are like landscapes from children’s stories, now altered by the insertion of antagonistic forces. Careful observation of her images will disturb the spectator because they are loaded with references charged by Western classical tenets, yet filtered by views influenced by cinema, literature, and contemporary cultural practices that are appropriate to the “new” technology of the image.

Carlos Duque, on the other hand, constructs and sculpts by means of smoke - fragile forms that make up a language that traps us in its airiness. These are flashes in suspension, instants which disappear in a split second. It is a bucolic experience of the practice of photography determined by time and its duration, and captured for all eternity by means of plunging a photographic surface into emulsion.

Fernando Cano leads us through a unique stretch of Colombian geography, where the transparency of a skirt twirling in a typical dance, or eyes hidden behind a carnival mask reveal multiple instances of joy in the souls that drown their daily problems in a festival. There is an internal debate between the exuberance of our idiosyncrasies, and a complex reality. Color, gestures, and conflicts make up the tour which we spectators, as if in a replay, experience when we allow ourselves to be captured by this trip into memory. We feel the spirit of people and their immense cultural treasures.

The Exhibition Committee