EDWIN MONSALVE: THE TRACE IN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION, AT FERNANDO PRADILLA
Álvaro de Benito
Memoria vegetal brings together previously unseen works that form landscapes describing processes and absences. Monsalve uses fossil residue as pigment, inserting it into his work both as a technique and as a symbol to reflect on how humanity transforms its environment and its own history.
The Fernando Pradilla Gallery hosts its final exhibition of the year, Memoria vegetal, a solo show by Edwin Monsalve (Medellín, Colombia, 1984). The exhibition presents recent works stemming from his ongoing research into the relationship between nature, landscape, extraction, and memory. Drawing inspiration from the botanical expeditions carried out by the scientist José Celestino Mutis during the 17th century, the series presented by the Colombian artist reinterprets the visual records of that period, emphasizing their sense of discovery and a certain degree of abstraction.
Monsalve maintains a curious gaze toward nature, yet in his desire to connect creation with destruction, he grants petroleum and coal—both materials originating from the decomposition of organic matter—a predominant role in his compositional technique. The depiction of the natural world thus takes place through these materials, conceptually inverting its meaning and allowing the same substances that once arose from forests and jungles to become, quite literally, pictorial matter.
This choice carries both critical and poetic weight, uniting the natural and the artificial, the organic and the industrial, within a single framework suitable for analysis. Monsalve invites reflection on the memory of nature and on residue as a byproduct of extractivism. In his works, landscapes—abstract in form yet with an evident figurative reference—emerge from darkness. As the artist himself notes, what we perceive as beautiful often conceals a “sublime terror,” as if warning us of the fragility of the natural environment in the face of human impact.
Edwin Monsalve. Memoria vegetal can be visited until January 17, 2026, at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery, Claudio Coello 20, Madrid (Spain).
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Isabella Lenzi (São Paulo, 1986) is a curator trained in architecture, museology, and art history. She lives in Madrid, where she works as Visual Arts Curator at the Círculo de Bellas Artes and as Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Fundación Alberto Cruz, following a trajectory that includes institutions such as the Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Mapfre, Videobrasil, the Cuenca Biennial, and the Whitechapel Gallery.
