COLOMBIAN ARTIST YURY FORERO TURNS NIGHT SKY INTO LAYERED PAINTINED IMAGES
In Diminuto Infinito, Colombian artist Yury Forero paints the night sky as a map made of doubts. These acrylic works on smooth paper pull nature, landscape, and territory into one restless cosmos, asking what any image can prove here.
When the Sky Becomes a Territory You Can Hold
These are intimate squares, acrylic on smooth paper, yet they open with the ambition of a ceiling. White flecks scatter across saturated blues, greens, purples, and rusts, as if someone insisted on making the infinite legible by counting it, dot by dot. . . “Diminuto Infinito”, a series, describe how the night sky we see is already a construction, a present made from light that began elsewhere, at other times, arriving late and arriving together. The series leans into that overlap and does not apologize for the ambiguity. Document and fiction sit in the same chair, highlighting how images mediate political and cultural understanding.
There is a physicality to that argument. Acrylic sits on paper with its own stubborn matter, a thinness that can look like vapor and a thickness that can look like sediment. You can almost feel the smooth watercolor sheet resisting the paint, the way washes pool and then stops, the way a darker band holds the edge of a lighter fog. This tactile quality emphasizes how materiality shapes perception, prompting viewers to consider the work’s physical presence as part of its conceptual message.
Forero, born in Bogotá, DC, in 1963 and now living in Bucaramanga, has long worked on the tensions between culture and history, tracking how art and politics braid together. The biography notes lines of inquiry that, at first, sound like separate doors: rite and simulacrum, archaeologies and imaginaries, obsolescence and atemporality, historicity and post-truth. The cosmos becomes less a destination than a method.
Ambiguity as Method, Not Mist
In the second example, the palette turns toward golds and violets, with a bluish, translucent seam cutting through the middle like a river seen from too high up, or like a photographic artifact that refuses to be cleaned away. Star-specks drift across everything, indifferent to what might be foreground or background.
What this does is force a question about territory without drawing a single border. Nature, landscape, territory: the notes place these terms in relation, and the paint keeps them in motion. The gold masses can read as landforms, clouds, or mineral bloom. The violet can read as night, shadow, or bruise. The pale seam can read as nebula, erosion, or a strip of overexposure. The point is not to decide, and the work does not reward certainty.
Forero’s practice pushes in the opposite direction. The series treats representation as a political problem because images always mediate knowledge, and images are never neutral. This approach underscores how visual language influences political narratives, prompting viewers to reflect on the power of images in shaping collective understanding.
From Rite and Simulacrum to a Painted Cartography
The third example shifts again, heavier in green, with orange pockets and milky, curling strokes that cross the surface like smoke, or like the trace of a gesture captured mid-turn. The star-specks are still there, now more scattered, and the paint seems to move laterally, as if the image is not only deep but also in transit. If the earlier pieces flirt with the feel of a distant sky, this one pulls the cosmos closer to the language of landscape. It is a reminder that the notes are not only about astronomy. They are about the relationships between nature, landscape, and territory, and how those relationships get narrated through images that can be both documentary and fictional.
Forero’s broader practice spans drawing, painting, object-based art, public sculpture, installations, video, and performance, as well as teaching and curating in contemporary art. That range matters here because Diminuto Infinito reads like a painting that has absorbed other media’s anxieties. The what might be foreground or background. That indifference matters. It makes the picture feel less like a window and more like a constructed surface, closer to the notes’ insistence that scientific images are also made, layered, and computed.
What this does is force a question about territory without drawing a single border. Nature, landscape, territory: the notes place these terms in relation, and the paint keeps them in motion. The gold masses can read as landforms, clouds, or mineral bloom. The violet can read as night, shadow, or bruise. The pale seam can read as nebula, erosion, or a strip of overexposure. The point is not to decide, and the work does not reward certainty.
It is tempting to treat a cosmos series as pure escape, a way to step outside history. Forero’s practice pushes in the opposite direction. The series treats representation as a political problem because images always mediate knowledge, and images are never neutral. This approach underscores how visual language influences political narratives, prompting viewers to reflect on the power of images in shaping collective understanding.
Forero’s broader practice spans drawing, painting, object-based art, public sculpture, installations, video, and performance, as well as teaching and curating in contemporary art. That range matters here because Diminuto Infinito reads like a painting that has absorbed other media’s anxieties. The works behave like a composite photograph, layered and persuasive, except that the hand is visible. The imperfections are not flaws to hide. They are the record of construction.
A Diminuto Infinito is not a contradiction in these paintings. It is the condition of looking, in Colombia, and anywhere else, where the present is made from distant sources arriving all at once.
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