10 August – 20 October, 2018

Opening: Thursday 9 August, 7pm

Proyecto AMIL
Lima

Proyecto AMIL is pleased to announce Coliflor, a solo exhibition by the Peruvian artist based in Bristol (UK), Esteban Igartua.

The show brings together Igartua’s most recent production, presenting landscapes, scenes and portraits. With an arresting meticulousness in his paintings and drawings, the artist captures both the grotesque and the ridiculous present in organic life and social interactions.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the exuberance of the shape and texture of the cauliflower. The shoots of the head of the vegetable – that individually resemble miniature trees and that together evoke fleshy masses similar to some human organs – is a metaphor for the associations that the artist himself establishes between the natural landscape and the human body.

With vividly coloured paint and both chromatic and monochromatic drawings, Igartua recreates fantastic sceneries that are characterized by an organic sensuality and sensory surplus: rock formations and mountains on which moss grows, masses of vegetation throughout which mushrooms spread, details of smoke and lava that result from volcanic eruptions. All of these expressions of broader physical or natural phenomena take place, as well, on an intimate scale in the human body. The artist’s interest does not focus, however, on understanding these processes from a purely physical or scientific perspective, but extends to the field of social commentary. Indeed, Igartua also confronts us with complex scenes in which deformed masculine characters interact in ambiguous situations over which he does not exercise any kind of judgment or moral interpretation. In essence, a catalogue of horrors and only apparent normalities.

In Coliflor, Igartua seeks to explore the dynamics of attraction-repulsion that the vigour of “the living” generates in human beings. That is, the thin line that separates beauty and abundance and the rejection caused by certain forms of voluptuousness and “excess of life”; turning the public into a silent and defenceless witness of a dystopian world of exuberant vitality.

About the artist

Esteban Igartua (Lima, 1974) lives and works in Bristol. He has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Catholic University of Peru and post-graduate degree from the Slade School of Arts and Byam Shaw in London. Recent exhibitions include: Excursion, Garua (Lima, 2015); Campo Ocupado, Revolver Gallery (Lima, 2012); The Culture Clash, Working Rooms (London, 2008); Prophet, Spike Island (Bristol, 2008); among many others. His work has been featured in catalogues such as the Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2003) and more recently in 77 artistas contemporaneos peruanos (2017), published by the Museo Mario Testino-MATE.