Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Frutas de bodegón. Expedición Sicilia (lámina 27) [Still-life Fruit, Sicily Expedition (plate 27)]

Image caption
ALBERTO BARAYA

Frutas de bodegón. Expedición Sicilia (lámina 27) [Still-life Fruit, Sicily Expedition (plate 27)]

  • 2018
  • Ceramics from the workshop of Todaro Tommasino in Santo Stefano di Camastra (Messina, Sicily, Italy), photographs and pencil on card
  • Cat. E_162
  • Acquired in 2021
  • Observations: A work made up of two pieces: Botanical plate: 112 × 80 × 5 cm and ceramic fruit bowl: 30 × 50 × 43 cm.
By:
Maite Méndez Baiges

This work comprises two pieces: a ceramic fruit bowl made by a Sicilian craftsman and a breakdown of it on an illustration plate where each piece of artificial fruit is set out in an orderly fashion as if in some sort of scientific classification. It mimics the style and characteristics of the scientific illustrations found in books on botany and herbaria (such as those of Celestino Mutis), produced in the wake of European expeditions around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. These books were samplers of plants sketched or preserved and presented in a taxonomical classification usually accompanied by further details such as the name of the person who had collected the sample, the place and date of collection and the habitat in which it had been found. The term 'taxonomy' comes from the Greek words taxis, meaning 'ordering' and nomos, meaning 'norm'. In the field of botany it refers to a Western epistemology associated with the world of explorers and European colonialism, and in particular the 'appropriation of the New World'. Baraya sees himself as a 'traveller' and mimics the behaviour of those explorers as a highly ironic way of dismantling and criticising the actions and viewpoints projected by Westerners in their description and domination of the world over the centuries. The inference is that the tools of European scientific knowledge applied by those supposedly objective, universal European explorers actually made them privileged accomplices to colonialism, even if they did not identify fully with the historical process involved. His discourse reveals scientific illustrations of American flora as a construct and not merely a passive reproduction. He also shows how the study and dissemination of plants influenced the construction of other identities in Latin American nations, e.g. in Colombia. The exuberance and exoticism that Europeans saw in the plant life of the Americas was transferred to the nature and identity of the people there.

Baraya often depicts plants and takes an interest in the use of false or artificial vegetation in everyday life. His Still-life Fruits, Sicilian Expedition (Plate 27) is a case in point. It is part of a project that he carried out during a stay in Palermo in 2018. Sicily is renowned for its white and multi-coloured ceramics, especially those featuring the testa di moro or 'Moor's head' (which shows the head of a Moorish noble cut off by a maiden), 'lucky pinecones', suns and lamps. They are the souvenirs/trophies par excellence that tourists visiting the island seek to snap up. Baraya explains that in the ceramics workshops of Santo Stefano de Camastra he found a fruit bowl still-life by a local craftsman called Tommasino, which he then separated into its component parts (pieces of fruit) using plaster moulds in his own workshop for his series Herbarium of Artificial Plants. This project looked at reproductions of pieces of fruit, some craft-made and others 'made in China', supposedly obtained from his work as an 'explorer', with expeditions seen as a fine art. His Sicilian project gave rise to a sampler of the artificial or fake fruit that he collected during his stay on the island, with particular attention paid to floral offerings associated with cultural traditions and rituals in different communities. The underlying idea in his work is that of nature as a cultural construct. These pieces thus constitute a way of addressing not just issues concerned with the representation of nature but also the nature of representation. It was shown at the Manifesta 12 Biennale in Palermo in 2018 and at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery in Madrid in 2019.

Maite Méndez Baiges

 
By:
Maite Méndez Baiges
Alberto Baraya
Bogotá 1968

Alberto Baraya lives and works partly in Bogota and partly in Madrid. He studied at the Faculty of Arts of the National University of Colombia, took a master's degree in the Aesthetics and Theory of Art at the Autonomous University of Madrid and then completed a specialist course in Multimedia at the Complutense University, also in Madrid. He began his career in 1992, using photography, video, found objects, collage, painting and installations.

One of his core themes is the study of the representation of nature. Through exploration and travel, his art projects investigate and question the processes of legitimisation of the Western scientific paradigm and its concept of nature. His explorations also extend to exoticism and colonialism. He had the idea of a character who travels around the world, whom he refers to as 'an artificial naturalist who serves as a parody of old-fashioned naturalists and scientists'. His work is often based on 'expeditions' that recreate the behaviour and forms of famous European explorers. These provide a basis for reproducing or simulating their catalogues of plants and animals, with supposedly aseptic, objective taxonomic descriptions in line with positivist Western thinking. Baraya's collections and catalogues of fake plants, such as his series Herbarium of Artificial Plants, featuring expeditions to Indianapolis, Sicily and California, can be seen as a gentle, ironic criticism of the alliance between scientific progress and colonial exploitation, and also as a representation of the nature of everyday aesthetic acts in different parts of the world. Baraya explores the idea of an 'illustrated journey' in more than one sense of the word. His projects bring to light the way in which nature is depicted as a construct, especially in the splendid illustration plates produced following explorations in the 18th century, such as the those headed by Celestino Mutis in Colombia. At the same time, they show how this construct of nature in Latin America, laden with exoticism and exuberance, helped shape the national identity of some Latin American countries. With his explorations of 'descriptions of the world', his depictions of landscapes or the artificiality of nature, drawing on his interest in stereotypical national identities (in which his status as both Spanish and Latin American is surely a factor), Baraya builds up evidence of the problems and conditions of current societies, in the conviction that the way in which we represent nature says more about us than it does about nature.

His work has been shown at the Berlin Biennale (2014), the International Art Biennial in Cuenca (2011), the Venice Biennale (2019), the São Paulo Biennial (2006), the Tokyoramas at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2001), the Fernando Pradilla Gallery in Madrid (2021), the 12th Shanghai Biennial (2021), the Miami Beast (2021), the Hay Festival in Segovia (2020) and the Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018). He has taken part in joint exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York (2014), the Itaú Cultural in São Paulo (2014), the Colección Jumex Foundation in Mexico City (2013) and the Gasworks in London (2009), among others. His works can be found in collections such as the Daniel and Estrellita B. Brodsky Family Foundation in New York, the Stavanger Kunstmuseum (MUST) in Stavanger, Norway, the Art Collection of the Banco de la República at the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogota, Colombia, the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, the Tenerife Photography Biennial in Santacruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia in Bogota and the Pierre Huber Films & Videos Collection in Switzerland.

Maite Méndez Baiges

 
«New Plants from Palermo & the Surrounding Area. A Sicilian Expedition», Manifesta 12. The Planetary Garden (Palermo (Italy), 2018). «Alberto Baraya. A Sicilian Expedition», Galería Fernando Pradilla (Madrid, 2019). «Diplomatic Herbaria. Sicilian Expedition», Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez. Embajada de Colombia en Madrid (Madrid, 2020). «Greenhouse in the Vegetable Garden of the Marquess of Villena», HAY FESTIVAL (Segovia, 2020). «Flowers & Fruit. Banco de España Collection», Banco de España (Madrid, 2022-2023).
Alberto Baraya, «Nuevas hierbas de Palermo y alrededores. Una expedición siciliana», Palermo, Manifesta 12, 2018, p. 14. Vv.Aa. Flores y frutos. Colección Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 2022.