EL TRAJE DEL PALACIO, ÁVILA'S SOLO SHOW AT NUEVEOCHENTA, COLOMBIA
From July 12th to August 14th, Nueveochenta presents El traje del Palacio (The Palace Suit), an individual exhibition by Colombian artist Jaime Ávila. Ávila's new work emerges as a tribute to his father. Through traditional cloths, the artist searches in his memory the first time he visited Bogotá, during the 70s.
A Colombian saying holds that "by dress the entrepreneur is known", it is from there that Ávila makes a proportional relation between the fabrics and the professions in which one must dress in a specific way. In El traje del Palacio, the ways in which the power structures present in a place determine the dress of those who frequent it are questioned and how that conditioning ends up creating stereotypes that become timeless.
The work generates a kind of correspondence between emblematic buildings of the city of Bogotá -like the Palace of Justice or the Primate Cathedral- and the cloths that best represent the grace of its colonial, neoclassical and modern architecture. Ávila part of the cachacos and executive suits that are seen every day in the Plaza de Bolivar to dress the buildings based on their location and significance, as if each of them could be noticed traits of these individuals and their respective trades.
Likewise, El traje del Palacio conserves the permanent graphic character in all the works of Ávila, in this case it is manifested through the modular construction of the images, the extension of the architecture through patterns that recall aerial views of the city and the game between textures that generates geometric contrasts.
Observed in an integral way, the sample constitutes a museography of the center of Bogotá, especially of the Plaza de Bolívar, emphasizing the tailoring as a traditional trade that has been disappearing over time as a result of the arrival of faster and disposable economies . It is a historical construction of what has been the Plaza and its surroundings, always from a perspective that proposes to visualize the importance of the roles of the individuals who frequent it, its relationship with the social phenomena present in said public space and its incidence. in the city.
