Adriana DUQUE




Gallery 1
September 10 to October 17 2014

Press Release

Adriana Duque’s first solo exhibition shown at our gallery presents a series of photographs that relate to painting, theatre, literature and film. Each one of the images displays her interest in the emotional atmosphere that characterizes the nature of the night. Her photographic work explores staged realities and wanders about the semi-darkness, the intimate, the silence and the mysterious to enter into the suspension of time and penetrate into an intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness, between reality and fiction. Desvelamientos unveils Duque’s world, which is suspicious of the noisy and the visible, to head towards the search for the secret and the loneliness in a continuous confrontation between realism and fantasy. The exhibition also contains works from other series by the artist, such as Iconos (Icons), Retratos Negros (Black Portraits) and La Corte Escondida (The Hidden Court), among others, where the landscapes, the portraits and the scenes derived from the history of art have become the main characters. Her work has been exhibited in international galleries and has become part of important collections.

A graduate in fine arts of Universidad de Caldas and with a specialization in digital photography from Instituto Grisart in Spain, Adriana Duque has received important awards and accolades, among which we can highlight the II Colombian-Swiss Photography Award in 2006, first place in the Regional Artists Salon of the Museum of Art of Pereira in 2002 and honorable mention in the Caribbean Biennale, held at the Museum of Modern Art of Santo Domingo in 2001.

Duque has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibitions at a national and international level. Her work has become part of important collections such as the 21C Museum in USA, the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, Colombia, and the RPA Collection in Sao Pablo, Brazil.



Adriana Duque’s new exhibition consists of landscapes, portraits of children and scenes derived from the history of art. Without giving up its own individuality, each image is loaded with the symbolic complexity of what is black and dark in our culture and collective psychology.

A group of photographs evokes the romantic view that connected the landscape to a state of the soul. They are hazy and imprecise images, framed within a chiaroscuro that blurs the shapes and where light and darkness, instead of opposing each other, seem to create each other. This series of landscapes exhibited at the Project Room of Galería El Museo gathers photographs taken by the artist in Italy, and comprises a homogenous group of images that enigmatically displays paths, roads without an origin or destination in the middle of nowhere and without any human presence, or better yet, where the human is shown, or felt, in its absence.

Portraits are a tradition of western art, and their purpose is to account for the soul of the person being portrayed, a claim radicalized in the child portraits presented by Adriana Duque in this exhibition. Boys and girls look at us from a distance, from a dark background, from a past and distant time, from a spectral universe, from the same psychic night that seems to define them. Therein lies the inscrutable force of their gaze and that silent intensity that goes beyond language; there is something in their infinite gaze that cannot be described with words and that overflows the idyllic and idealized conception we have of children.

In another group of portraits, the framing distances itself from the frontal perspective and the foreground to let us see a scenario that is typical of the representations of the princesses of Flemish art. Due to the darkness and the spectral paleness of the faces, they are loaded with mystery, of something arrested in time, or are found in a time when different temporalities are cited. In some of them we find a hidden area in the upper part of the scene that questions and disturbs the order and coherence of the representation: a trace of a Colombian peasant enclosure. It is as if another reality were hiding behind the manifest, as if these local realities emerged behind a magical and imaginary world with a European origin. This assembly of uneven times and spaces is added to the ambiguity caused by the semi-darkness and by the deliveries and redeliveries between the photographic space and the pictorial space, between the sensation of photographic reality and pictorial fiction, between the clarity of presence and the darkness of the absent or the lost.

Portraits of girls travel through time to take the place of the women of Vermeer, except that, in this opportunity, the scene takes place at night. The distance and the darkness are barely altered by a light that softly enters through the window of the left side, revealing the girls’ extreme paleness. All of them are suspended in time, ritualizing the acts they undertake, such as knitting or reading.

These are girl-women, found in nocturnal and intimate venues in a state of waiting, as if they wanted to point out the feminine depth of said condition. They are found near the window, they look outside, expecting to be impregnated by some presence. However, in the archetype of wait in its biblical sense itself, it is an emotional state that does not enter in conflict with the present. On the contrary, it is a full presence, a presence that ritualizes the present moment with its slowness. The wait emerges as a way of being, as a generous and deep identity, worlds are woven and life is filled with a deep intimacy while the wait takes place. The feminine waits, the wait is feminine.
Adriana Duque’s images deal with time, dead time, the time where apparently nothing goes on, the time out of time, suspended time, the time of wait. The exhibition is completed with three videos that end up consolidating these feelings. At the edge of silence and stillness, the three videos suspend life in its day-to-day rhythms to introduce us into another time. Based on a slow movement, they challenge and animate the rest of the static images, as if all of them were orchestrated in that paused pace.

The exhibition reveals characters that are defined by the hidden, intimate, solitary, self-absorbed and silent. They bring us into a world that goes against a culture that loves everything that is clear, boisterous, certain and precise. Adriana Duque’s world is suspicious of the visible, the collective and the noisy, and searches for the barely seen, the secret and the loneliness. Maybe we can ultimately quote Pascal Quignard: “perhaps they should mute the language and address the world again a little quieter, a little naughty, a little more confused”.

Javier Gil


Retratos Negros