Peruano accidental en busca del dorado

With the pretext of Peru’s presence as the guest country in ARCO, and in tune with the fair’s own program, Nader Barhumi presents us a set of unpublished series which change between abstraction and symbolism.

The first of these, "Finding El Dorado" is an installation composed of more than thirty paintings in round format, representing, in an abstract way, the poetic imagination of what the navigators who first came to the Americas may have dreamed of 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 as they contemplate the starry sky imagining their destiny. To access this room, visitors cross a sand line that evokes the one that, with his sword, Francisco Pizarro drew on Gallo Island 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 stylised designs cover, randomly, the surface of these "fabrics" of metal.

In the third and final series "Accidental Peruvian" - which gives name to the entire exhibition - Nader reveals his daily exercise in different supports and materials such as aluminium, vitra and paper. It gives free rein to his eclecticism and to the influences that have accompanied him throughout his life, from Precolumbian sources to the works of his great masters such as the Impressionists, Jasper Johns and Anselm Kiefer, through Islamic ornamentation and Japanese, American and European painting. All of them form the sources from which this artist feeds, regardless of nationalisms and conceptualisms which he considers unnecessary.