PERUVIAN ACCIDENTAL SEARCHING OF EL DORADO

Under the pretext of Peru's presence as a guest country at ARCO and in tune with the fair's own program, Nader Barhumi presents us with a set of unpublished series that move between abstraction and the symbolic.

The first of them, "The Search for El Dorado" is an installation composed of more than thirty paintings in a round format, which represent, in an abstract way, the poetic imaginary of what the sailors who arrived at the sea for the first time could have dreamed of. Americas in search of fortune. This includes the series "Six Visions of a Night Navigator", paintings painted on metal in which Barhumi suggests what these explorers would see when they contemplated the starry sky imagining their destination. To access this room, visitors cross a line of sand that evokes the one that Francisco Pizarro drew with his sword on the island of Gallo in 1527 and that was crossed by those who would later be known as "The Thirteen of Fame".

The second series of this exhibition entitled "Nazca" represents the famous looms and geoglyphs of this ancient Peruvian civilization. Today his abstract and stylized designs run haphazardly across the surface of these metal “fabrics”.

In the third and last series "Accidental Peruano" - which gives its name to the entire exhibition - Nader reveals his daily exercise in different supports and materials such as aluminum, vitra and paper. Unleash his eclecticism and the influences that have accompanied him throughout his life, from pre-Columbian sources to the works of his great masters such as the Impressionists, Jasper Johns and Anselm Kiefer, through Islamic ornamentation and Japanese paintings, American and European. All of them make up the sources from which this artist feeds, regardless of nationalisms and conceptualisms that he considers unnecessary.