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Artifice

By Ana Martinez Quijano

Curatorial Text 

There is an urban garden where time has stopped. There paper orchids float and there are butterflies of gigantic size. The light, the reflections, give rise to a tide of sensations, awaken the senses and the memory. The botanical designs of Andrés Paredes become ornamental motifs. The stylized forms of the frond are repeated again and again in drawings where the fruits have bristled. The shadows are outlined on the ceiling and look out over the wall, forming a forest where the tangled vegetation intersects.

Andrés Paredes managed to activate inert materials. With the intention of provoking an aesthetic experience, he set up an enveloping stage and harbored his theatrical visions of the landscape. To arouse emotions in the spectator, he magnified the experience of nature, making it more wild, virgin and exuberant. There are the undulating buds with sweet colors and the dragonflies and cicadas on curly and rebellious lianas.

The simulacrum of nature, with its contrasts, its exalted forms or stripped of the superfluous, has a great power of retinal attraction, arouses the desire to inhabit this world of fable. Multicolored glasses, antiques and objects, update a story about the eternal fascination of man for the fantastic.

Paredes was born in the missionary jungle and his artworks are poetic gestures, they are here simply to be contemplated, to fan the memory of a beauty where one can guess, as Stendhal observed, a promise of happiness.

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