The works presented by Andrés Paredes at the Palatina Gallery maintain the same esthetics as the first one he brought to arteBA, a green and exultant log resembling the nature in his native Misiones, which, in 2005, immediately seduced the public at the exhibition. With his trained gaze, Spanish gallery owner Guillermo de Osma was the first one to discover him, and, since then, Paredes has become a common signature among Argentine collections. 

Today, the lace-like fretworks made on paper and wood, the swarm of abstract looking lights and shadows, hold the beauty of his early work. However, something has changed in that universe. Ochre and dry colors from autumn have appeased the splendor of a spring that seemed eternal, the matter’s texture has become rugged, and the shadows depth more intense.  

If artists, with their tuned perception, work as a seismograph for the social, political and cultural terrain in which they live, the change announced by Paredes’s new production seems to hold a connection with the planet’s metamorphosis, with the eternal night creeping on a not so distant horizon. In this changing world, the work’s narrative ability grows and, at the same time, the potent imagery sheltered by memory persists: the splendor of the Jesuitical ruins’ terracotta, and that of the baroque shapes and Paraguay’s embroidery, mixed in a kind crossbreeding with the melancholic lines of art nouveau that the artist learned about from books. Swinging between two-dimensional and tridimensional surfaces, the cuts and trims on the material allow light to pass through and, in that way, project a shadow that acquires an unusual protagonism and shapes an entire work that urges to leave itself. 

Without prejudice or fear, Paredes seeks the most radical and extreme beauty while, in an epicurean sense, he turns to nurturing the plants that grow in his garden. Within Apóstoles’ –the distant community where he lives- voluntary solitude, he draws a line that creeps nonstop across all his works. All drawings can be seen as one and the same, extending through that eternally flowing line’s continuity, as if the work’s meaning were being constructed on the ornamental excess of these waves.

In the narrative woven by the drawing, memory is awaken by the hollow trees, with their empty logs, and the dry branches that grow and blossom with no reason. Infinite lines tell stories from abundant counties with red colored earth, where a humid jungle lies and life flows; a place where flowers and perfumes enhance senses and memory. Within the narrative, the filigree of a work made on black paper appears, cut over a black background. It is night approaching.