CARLOS CASTRO AND THE REASSESSMENT OF COLOMBIA'S VISUAL HISTORY

Paisaje Desviado (Deviated Landscape), by Carlos Castro (Cali, Colombia, 1970), currently on view at La Cometa's Madrid gallery, offers a revisionist critique of the Colombian landscape through the appropriation of engravings produced by European travelers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than reproducing these images as historical records, Castro intervenes in them, reversing their original meanings and transforming them into instruments of critical inquiry and analysis.

To achieve this, the artist employs drawing, figuration, and abstraction, revealing how landscape functions as a cultural construct shaped by relations of power, memory, and identity rather than as an objective representation of reality. His work invites viewers to reconsider the ways in which Colombia's collective visual imaginary has been historically constructed. By establishing an anachronistic dialogue with the past, Castro's practice of appropriation and re-signification challenges linear conceptions of history and opens alternative modes of interpretation.

These works move beyond purely aesthetic concerns, foregrounding critical reflection on the visibility and invisibility of subjects and objects within official historical narratives. In this sense, Paisaje Desviado advances an understanding of art and visual practice as critical tools capable of interrogating hegemonic accounts of history. Castro does not seek to provide definitive answers; rather, his work creates a space for reflection on the construction of identity, the persistence of cultural imaginaries, and the possibility of reinterpreting the past from a contemporary perspective.

Carlos Castro: Paisaje Desviado is on view through 31 July at La Cometa, San Lorenzo 11, Madrid, Spain.