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BERCHEM
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Tropical Buren

Paintings | Installations

2016

 

Otto Berchem has done obsessive studies of codes, and ways of classification. Being a foreigner in Colombia he decided to put together two of his principal interests, the tradition of conceptual painting, and the botanical expedition done in Colombia by priest and scientist Jose Celestino Mutis in the 18th and 19th century as a way to generate an inventory of the exotica discoveries in the tropical flora of the country. Berchem does a new inventory of plants painting their silhouettes and intervening them with appropriations of one of the most important conceptual painters of all times, Daniel Buren whose signature stripes have given a new perspective painting as they go beyond painting itself to be appreciated as space itself. When he used to put the posters all over metro stations, he called them affichages sauvages, ( wild posters). Berchem mixes this idea of intervening a space and brings together a homage to conceptualism revisiting views of the wild tropics. The rationality of the stripe contrasts with the exotic and random shapes of nature in this intent to do a new classification through the contemporary foreigners point of view.