GUESTS

In this pictorial setting, everything seems to have already happened. As if we had just arrived at the end of a play and could still find, lingering in the air, the echoes of the actors, the tension of the final gesture, the set half dismantled. In Enrique Jaramillo Barnes’ paintings, the curtain never falls—it remains suspended. The characters—anonymous, faceless—do not act, they pose. They are presences placed there, as part of an eternal rehearsal.

Geometry organizes everything: planes, lines, structures that open and fold, as if we were inside an architectural model where time itself is also built according to rules. There is something deliberately unfinished, an atmosphere of provisionality that is not chaos, but design. Nothing is left to chance, even if everything appears on the verge of movement.

The color, restrained yet not muted, runs through the work like an earthy whisper: leather, brick, clay, dust. But here and there—and almost always in secret—an unexpected accent bursts forth: an electric blue, an acidic yellow, an almost absurd green. In those touches, memory turns mischievous, and the childlike bursts in without asking permission.

Behind the scenes, figures emerge from a pop iconography that has lost its innocence: fragments of cartoons, mental toys, winks to a shared culture diluted over time. These are not nostalgic quotations but apparitions—as if the images of childhood, far from fading, insisted on returning with a crooked smile.

There are no faces because none are needed. These identity-less bodies are, paradoxically, more human. They carry the weight of everyone. It is not about portraying someone, but about evoking anyone. And within that anonymity resides the power: the possibility of being all and none.

The scenes are paused, but not static. There is depth without optical illusion. There is perspective without a horizon. As if space itself had been bent, folded into layers to allow the flat to become volume, the graphic to become presence, the theatrical to become painting.

Guests, indeed. Because these characters do not belong to the space. They have been placed there as an irruption, a wink, a memory that slips into the scene when everything seemed to have been put in order. Painting, then, does not narrate—it suggests. It does not illustrate—it evokes. It is the viewer who must decipher the work, as one might peek behind the curtain to try to guess what really happened.

César Sasson Pinto
Independent curator, trained in Civil Engineering, Cultural Management, and Art Curation in Venezuela, the United States, and Spain. Over the years, he has complemented his curatorial work with creative writing and documentary narrative workshops in Caracas and Panama. He has written texts for exhibitions and catalogs in Venezuela, the United States, and Ecuador. Among his international collaborations, his text for an exhibition at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington stands out, as well as the inclusion of a fragment of one of his writings in the Official Awards Catalog of the Cuenca Biennial (1987–2009), a milestone in the region. He is an active contributor to correocultural.com.

*Cover image: Enrique Jaramillo Barnes, 2025 (180x130cm).