Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1977) finely rendered charcoal drawings play with and subvert various colonialist tropes of tropical culture. A through line of his work is questioning the idea of what a Latin American artist should be, and how tropes and stereotypes impact expectations of subject matter. In his more surreal art, palm trees burst into grandiose architectural settings, creating an unsettling atmosphere. Many of Fuenmayor’s drawings have a discordant note that contrasts objects of the manmade world with a Nature that is threatening. In Dramaturgia de laVida Misma (Dramaturgy of Life Itself) there is breaking down the “instrument” of civilization. The artist shows us a delicate harpsichord destroyed by the upward, violent thrust of a phallic palm tree, splitting the instrument in two, and rendering its music silenced. In one sense the picture reminds us of the fragility of stringed musical instruments and old wood, as the humidity of the tropics is always their enemy, a source of warping destruction. In a similar work showing the destruction of a musical instrument, The Monopoly of Patriotism, the artist draws a piano marooned in the tall grasses of a savannah, pierced by hundreds of arrows. Fuenmayor reminds us that the attempt to bring the Western culture to “primitive” peoples might engender a violent reaction.
