Mariane Ibrahim is proud to present Selva color del tiempo, José Gamarra’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. The exhibition takes its title from the text Édouard Glissant wrote for Gamarra’s 1985 exhibition at Galerie Albert Loeb in Paris. A central figure in Caribbean thought and the Poetics of Relation, Glissant engaged with the artist’s work for decades as a writer, collector, and friend. In the essay that lends the exhibition its title, Glissant identifies in Gamarra’s painting a conception of the forest that exceeds the conventions of landscape. The forest emerges as a territory in which history remains inscribed and from which the experience of the Americas can be understood. Far from representing the Amazon as a remote or untouched space, Gamarra transforms it into an archive where conquest, colonization, the exploitation of natural resources, and their persistence in the present converge. Presented for the first time in Mexico, his work proposes a continental reading in which the forest ceases to belong to any single country and becomes a place from which the shared history of the Americas can be read.
The exhibition brings together works made between 1966 and 2026, from the ink drawings that accompanied the transformation of Gamarra’s pictorial language to Fleuve de sang (2026). Rather than a retrospective, the exhibition traces a sustained investigation across six decades, during which landscape becomes the ground for a reflection on the history of the continent.
Born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, in 1934, Gamarra studied in Montevideo and lived in São Paulo between 1960 and 1963 before settling permanently in Paris. During these years, his painting shifted from abstraction toward landscape, a change shaped both by his experience in Brazil and by his readings of Horacio Quiroga and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as his study of painters such as Frans Post (1612–1680) and Claude Lorrain (1600–1682). The forest that began to appear in his work does not correspond to a specific place, nor does it derive from direct observation of the Amazon. It is a landscape constructed through historical, literary, and pictorial references, in which different temporalities enter into relation.
From the late 1960s onward, against the backdrop of successive military dictatorships in Latin America, Gamarra developed a body of painting shaped by foreign intervention, the exploitation of natural resources, and political violence. Over time, these events ceased to appear as explicit scenes and became absorbed into the landscape. Sixteenth-century conquistadors, explorers, Indigenous communities, helicopters, extractive industries, and animals coexist within the same pictorial space. History is no longer organized as a sequence of events, but instead accumulates in layers across the territory.
Selva color del tiempo proposes that José Gamarra’s painting be read through this accumulation of temporalities. The forest does not function as the backdrop to history, but as its archive: a place where conquest, colonization, capitalism, and environmental devastation remain visible, and where the landscape preserves the memory of the Americas.
