Las huellas del viento

2022, mor charpentier, Paris, France.

In Daniel Otero Torres’ first solo exhibition at mor charpentier, mythologies, diverse cultural and iconographic references converge with the artist’s personal memories. All of them framed by a manifestation of time that is not linear, but cyclical and multiform, in which different pasts/ presents/futures can coexist, connected to each other by links of meaning. The way in which this imaginary is constructed may remind us of the narrative forms of the magical realism; interweaving the history with the fable, real references and truthful documents with dreamlike and implausible plots. His images transport us, in effect, to a transversal plane of reality, a fertile and propitious terrain for narrative possibilities, as could have been the city of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

On the upper floor a dialogue between three works is established. Each one of them has a plant as protagonist: corn, banana and poppy flower; all of them filled with an enormous cultural and symbolic load, particularly in Latin America. The work of Daniel Otero Torres is the result of an exercise of awareness, reassessment and perspective of history through its images and emblems. A re-reading that makes possible the construction of spaces for resistance and new allegories for revolution and liberation.

The series of sculptures of the Caminantes, which unravel in the space and seems to sink little by little into the floor of the gallery, is based on an anonymous photograph of a United Fruit Company worker (1913). The sequence of silhouettes of the man bearing the bunch of bananas blends in with the fruit and turns itself into a hybrid gradually rooting in the earth.

A series of paintings unfolds as a backdrop. They are inspired by a childhood memory of the family farm where corn was grown, in a field constantly overflown by birds. This crop has traditionally been the backbone of American societies and constitutes a form of identity and resistance for native peoples.

A third work introduces the image of the poppy flower, from which opium and its derivatives are extracted, transforming the exhibition space into a field of flowers of exaggerated proportions in which the stems extend to almost reach the ceiling of the gallery. The installation invites to wander among the suspended pieces, and to metaphorically connect the terrestrial plane of the real with that of the altered states of consciousness, floating towards infinity.

In tune with the archaeological references that are often incorporated in his projects, the lower space of the gallery is configured as a sort of hypogeum; an underground realm, like a crypt or an excavated temple, populated by a collection of terracotta vases illus- trated with a fascinating iconographic program, alternating totemic images with verna- cular culture, technology or science fiction. Daniel Otero Torres’s vessels emphasize the intimate relationship between primordial manifestation of human technology and the sophisticated scientific developments of the present. Between both poles, bridges of symbols are built, anchored on the jubilant allegory of a universe halfway between the archaic and the post-human.

Daniel Otero Torres

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