Colibrí, De noche y de día, Reunión Condor, Saludando a los sabios, Tree of life, Welcome to the Jaguar House, 2021-2022
Current
Collection
Loans
Colibrí, 2021
Ceramic, 33 x 53 cm
De noche y de día, 2021
Ceramic, 31 x 26 cm
Reunión Condor, 2022
Ceramic, 36 x 36 cm
Saludando a los sabios, 2021
Ceramic, 24 x 49.5 cm
Tree of life, 2021
Ceramic, 31 x 40 cm
Welcome to the Jaguar House, 2021
Ceramic, 33 x 43 cm
Six ceramic vessels, installed on a wall-like support structure illustrate Daniel Otero Torres’s ongoing examination of pre-Columbian knowledge and legends from different regions of Latin America and imagined correspondences with archaic cultures around the Mediterranean, Hindu and Egyptian deities, and references to contemporary culture. Stripped of their contexts and transposed on the ceramic surface, Torres’s hybrid iconography generates a lexicon of relationships between time, space, and beings. The vases and the drawings that adorn them are the outcome of a process of collecting archival or media images and photographs taken during the artist’s travels, which he combines into heterogeneous compositions. Seen together they produce an alternative history of crossings and syncretism, reflecting on what connects us to others from the point of view of the myth and of political struggles, as much as of daily life.
In De noche y de día (Night and day) and Saludando a los sabios (Saluting the wise), the geometric patterns typical of the wall paintings of Tierradentro—an archaeological funerary site in Colombia—merge with those of Etruscan frescoes. In Welcome to the Jaguar House, leopards from the necropolis of Monterozzi in Tarquinia, Italy, meet the jaguar warriors depicted on the mural of the battle of Cacaxtla in Mexico. A key figure among the Olmec, the jaguar mediates between physical and mythical worlds, inhabiting animal and human existences. As an attribute of the shaman capable of assuming feline vision, it circulates between the world of the living, the underworld, and the celestial plane.
Torres also uses a narrative register that links science, genetics, and technology. In Tree of life Torres evokes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through the archetype of the tree of life and a transcription of human DNA. In Colibrí the image engraved in the clay references the evolution of species through the representation of hummingbirds, a large cell containing DNA and other plasmids, and an anaconda emerging from it. And, in Reunión Condor (Condor Meeting), the vase holds genetically altered corn, commercialized by companies such as Monsanto and Bayer, whose wide use in the Americas contaminates both the diversity of native maize and the insect populations targeted by the transgenic modifications.
CURRENT LOANS
Group show: Remedios
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 14 April 2023 - March 2024
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1985. Lives in Paris, France.
Ceramic, 33 x 53 cm
De noche y de día, 2021
Ceramic, 31 x 26 cm
Reunión Condor, 2022
Ceramic, 36 x 36 cm
Saludando a los sabios, 2021
Ceramic, 24 x 49.5 cm
Tree of life, 2021
Ceramic, 31 x 40 cm
Welcome to the Jaguar House, 2021
Ceramic, 33 x 43 cm
Six ceramic vessels, installed on a wall-like support structure illustrate Daniel Otero Torres’s ongoing examination of pre-Columbian knowledge and legends from different regions of Latin America and imagined correspondences with archaic cultures around the Mediterranean, Hindu and Egyptian deities, and references to contemporary culture. Stripped of their contexts and transposed on the ceramic surface, Torres’s hybrid iconography generates a lexicon of relationships between time, space, and beings. The vases and the drawings that adorn them are the outcome of a process of collecting archival or media images and photographs taken during the artist’s travels, which he combines into heterogeneous compositions. Seen together they produce an alternative history of crossings and syncretism, reflecting on what connects us to others from the point of view of the myth and of political struggles, as much as of daily life.
In De noche y de día (Night and day) and Saludando a los sabios (Saluting the wise), the geometric patterns typical of the wall paintings of Tierradentro—an archaeological funerary site in Colombia—merge with those of Etruscan frescoes. In Welcome to the Jaguar House, leopards from the necropolis of Monterozzi in Tarquinia, Italy, meet the jaguar warriors depicted on the mural of the battle of Cacaxtla in Mexico. A key figure among the Olmec, the jaguar mediates between physical and mythical worlds, inhabiting animal and human existences. As an attribute of the shaman capable of assuming feline vision, it circulates between the world of the living, the underworld, and the celestial plane.
Torres also uses a narrative register that links science, genetics, and technology. In Tree of life Torres evokes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through the archetype of the tree of life and a transcription of human DNA. In Colibrí the image engraved in the clay references the evolution of species through the representation of hummingbirds, a large cell containing DNA and other plasmids, and an anaconda emerging from it. And, in Reunión Condor (Condor Meeting), the vase holds genetically altered corn, commercialized by companies such as Monsanto and Bayer, whose wide use in the Americas contaminates both the diversity of native maize and the insect populations targeted by the transgenic modifications.
CURRENT LOANS
Group show: Remedios
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 14 April 2023 - March 2024
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1985. Lives in Paris, France.