Tropicarios #2

Tropicarios #2 from Tropicarios series, 2017 by Paloma Castello
From the Tropicarios series
Digital photography print on chroma luxe.
Unframed

Similar to the travel logs of the ancient explorers, in her diaries, Castello portrays the landscapes and settings witnessed during several visits to the Colombian tropics, along with texts that describe what she saw and experienced there. Unconcerned with producing a reliable account of the places visited, these journals are instead a cartographic guide to the artist’s sensations in those places. Unable to separate the
experience from what is perceived, her lens becomes a true superposition of imagination and reality.

Cowboys, dinosaurs, cars, surfers, mountains, stones, palm trees... At first glance, these elements don't seem to have much in common, but as one's gaze delves deeper into the details it is possible to step inside a universe that seems nearer. The protagonists come alive and the separate elements form part of a nature suggesting autonomy as if these landscapes or scenarios actually existed and had been photographed.

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Paloma Castello born 1988 Bogotá, Colombia. Use her work to bring life to a different narrative of an object’s past. She is interested in playing with memory and relating it to the present, creating an atmosphere between reality and fiction. Her family and social background have a powerful influence on her work. She grows up surrounded by objects and anecdotes inherited from her ancestors, those objects inspire endless surreal stories. Her work emerges from these experiences; they are evidence of her “auto-fiction”.

"Paloma Castello presents to us a nostalgia-filled body of work. The collection represents the soul of her proposal: inherited objects discovered or found that have become the tip of the iceberg of her past. These are elements she collects, recollects, and then classifies following a method that frames her anachronic attitude that proves as evidence of the youth of her art.
She also demonstrates that the experimentations on herself are common in an artist who’s just beginning her career. Without a doubt, this resource, valid and true becomes the road that determines the experimental character of the author.