For its second participation in Untitled Art Miami Beach, Alma Pearl is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Colombian artist Jhonatan Pulido. This presentation–the artist’s first in the US–captures the young painter’s use of bold colour and expressive form. These recent works are a celebration of warm memories of the flora that surrounds as well as the ancestral patterns and shapes adorning the building of his native country.
To achieve this, Pulido powerfully engages with the materiality of the medium–disassembling and repairing elements of the support, pushing some painterly marks to the fore while excavating earlier layers in the making process. Addition and subtraction is a key element in his process, where the act of making ties into the psycho-social memories of growing up in the Meta region. If previous works explored the trauma of Colombia’s civil war and struggles amongst the civilian population, these new works–while still being based in those memories and experiences–offer a celebration of the rich colours and vibrant flora that remains the ground against which memory operates in his work. Diamond shaped symbols–a key motif in this series of paintings–were, and still are painted to bring rain, good luck and abundant crops and ties back to indigenous, shamanistic and ancestral beliefs. Today these symbols are painted on house fronts just as their ancestors painted them on rock faces.
Jhonatan Pulido’s painting practice is centred on expressive mark making that draws on an explosive colour palette. He works through a continual application of material that produces bold fields of colour and form that interact and overlap to explore the vibrancy of painting today alongside the evocation of memory and reparation of trauma lodged in the past.
