Gonzalo Fuenmayor - Tropical Depression

Fernando Pradilla Gallery presents its third exhibition of Gonzalo Fuenmayor (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1977) in their premises. Under the title Tropical Depression, Fuenmayor brings together a set of new charcoal drawings made specifically for our gallery. The exhibition explores the duality between natural chaos and apparent serenity, using the meteorological phenomenon as a metaphor to address cultural and personal transformation and hybridization.
Fuenmayor's work is placed an intersection where exuberance and contradiction merge in a single image. His monumental compositions not only stand out for their masterful technical skill, but for their ability to articulate a critical vision of history, power and identity. In his work, ornament and opulence, generally associated with a sense of authority and dominance, meet the wild, the uncontrollable, that which escapes imposed structures. This tension is not accidental, but a deliberate construction that forces the viewer to rethink the stories of colonization, modernity and their traces in the present.
Through drawing, Fuenmayor confronts the duality between civilizing splendor and untamed nature, a coexistence that is presented as a visual oxymoron. The weight of European history – represented in palatial architecture, crystal chandeliers and other symbols of power – coexists with the boundless density of the tropics, a geography that has been historically exoticized and reduced to an image of overflowing abundance. However, in his work, this encounter does not occur from naive exoticism, but from a critical awareness: the dazzling beauty of these compositions hides a latent tension, a clash of forces that reveals the invisible wounds of the past.
The concept of cultural hybridization is central to his work. The fusion of seemingly opposing elements not only demonstrates the impossibility of separating them, but also raises a reflection on how these influences have shaped our perception of the world. The history of nature is also the history of desire and exploitation; the progress of some has meant the devastation of others. In this sense, Fuenmayor does not illustrate a dichotomy between the colonial and the native, between the artificial and the organic, but rather shows how these elements have always been entangled in the same story of power and appropriation.
The decision to eliminate colour in his work is not a simple aesthetic gesture, but a strategy of subversion. The visual identity of the tropics has historically been codified through a saturated palette, associated with joy, excess and festivity. By stripping his images of this element, Fuenmayor forces the viewer to look beyond what is expected, to delve into the depth of drawing as a territory of reflection and questioning. In his charcoal compositions, light and shadow take on a symbolic role: what is revealed and what is hidden, the visible and the latent, what history has sought to erase and what persists in collective memory.
Beyond a simple rereading of the past, his work is an exercise in resistance to hegemonic narratives. The grandiloquence of his images is not a tribute to opulence, but a way of exposing its paradoxes. In his drawings, splendor becomes disturbing, the majestic is threatened by its own fragility, and history refuses to be fixed in a single version of the facts. It is in this tension, in this precarious balance between what is imposed and what is revealed, that Fuenmayor builds his visual language.