-
JOSÉ GAMARRA
SELVA COLOR DEL TIEMPO
September 3 - December 19, 2026
Mexico City
-
José Gamarra, Fleuve de sang, 2026
-
-
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.
-
“Culture allows us to respond to the challenges of existence.
Art not only gives us pleasure; it also leads us to reflect.
With the most refined colors and aesthetic language possible, I try to approach beauty in my own way. My painting is rooted in the history of Latin America and can be read as a kind of chronicle. Over the years, I have made paintings that evoke events in the life of a people or of individuals, the emotional weight of stories remembered and worthy of being painted:
Si todos los hombres del mundo, 1966; El Progreso de una ayuda, 1969; La operación requerirá la asistencia de especialistas extranjeros, 1975; Parece Arica, 1976; Anaconda Copper Mining, 1978; Histoires et premonitions du Nouveau Monde, 1979; Las tentaciones de Hernán Cortés, 1981; Cinco siglos de tormenta, 1984; Crónicas de una historia, 1985;
Reconquista, 1992...
The shifts in time that I introduce—the present, past, and future can coexist on the same canvas—allow the conquistadors of the past and those of today to coexist. El Dorado never existed, yet many of my paintings evoke it: the poetry of a lost Eden, the earthly paradise that the first ‘discoverers’ believed they had found... The symbolic language of signs that I used long ago in my painting gradually opened onto another translation: landscape and human reality, forest and destiny. Latin America...
My forests have been visited by new conquistadors who use flamethrowers to erase rainbows and replace the majestic condor with helicopters: a double assault on people and on nature. On the one hand, there is the clash between worlds that have been exploited from the past into the present; on the other, there is joy, the search for stories and legends. Between utopia and what is possible lies the challenge of the future: to make strength and courage our own, to develop the capacity to overcome every obstacle in order to reach a world of peace, justice, and tolerance, where abundance and happiness will be the prerogative of all.”
—José Gamarra
-
Artist Portrait of José Gamarra in his Atelier, 2019.
Photo by Pascal Milhavet.
