Tropico Canonico

At the Liga – Espacio para Arquitectura gallery in Mexico City, Camilo Restrepo conceived an ethereal and fragile atmosphere, created by thirteen sheets of printed cloth.

Camilo Restrepo (AGENdA), Canonical Tropics, installation view at LIGA, Mexico City, 2017
A world comprised of translucent images of tropical plants invites the public viewing LIGA 25 to enter the exhibition space. This ethereal and fragile atmosphere is created by thirteen sheets of printed cloth that recall the curtains used by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich in the Café Samt & Seide in 1927, arranged according to the layout of Aldo Van Eych’s 1966 Sonsbeek Pavilion.

 

The exhibition by Colombian architect Camilo Restrepo, founder of the AGENdA studio, plays with the rules of Romantic painting to create a traversable hologram of the garden in his own studio in Medellin. The superimposition of motifs of plants from his native country transfers not only the ideas and concerns but the very workspace of the architect to the gallery.

Camilo Restrepo (AGENdA), Canonical Tropics, installation view at LIGA, Mexico City, 2017
Camilo Restrepo (AGENdA), Canonical Tropics, installation view at LIGA, Mexico City, 2017
In this way, Canonical Tropics questions the aesthetic notion with which European naturalists, led by the German Alexander von Humboldt and the Spaniard José Celestino Mutis – who met in Bogota around the year 1800 – both deconstructed and synthesized huge swathes of the tropical region of the Americas on the basis of partial representations. Here, Camilo Restrepo offers a contemporary tropical narrative in which the stylized visions of the surroundings adapt to the visitor’s movement through the space.
Camilo Restrepo (AGENdA), Canonical Tropics, installation view at LIGA, Mexico City, 2017
Camilo Restrepo (AGENdA), Canonical Tropics, installation view at LIGA, Mexico City, 2017

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