THE NARCO-HYPOPOTAMUSES’ TALE, BY CAMILO RESTREPO
The double problem that arose from the acquisition in the 1980s of several hippopotamuses in one of the many eccentricities of the trafficker Pablo Escóbar is the starting point of a fable that, between the tragic and the comic, Camilo Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia, 1975) has managed to weave with a very successful graphic and conceptual narrative. With Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood, the spectator faces this surrealistic story from its beginnings to the present by the hand of a figurativism that sets aside the academic and the technical for the sake of a greater aesthetic and relational concordance with that of the madness transmitted by the story itself.
If the fact itself may seem dreamlike, the truth is that the problem of the so-called “drug hippopotamuses” has become a chaos of the first order. What is interesting about this story is the sublimation of the intricacies and satire with which Restrepo flows through the story. Starting with a mural of multiple roles in which the general history of the hippopotamus as an animal is traced, the Colombian artist uses pop figures and characters, as well as an abundance of current iconography to identify new elements in his conceptual research where the background, the invisible, takes on special prominence.
From this great seminal framework, which in itself contains elements that advocate an endless number of readings that the visitor will have to recognize, new stories have germinated, derivatives that take on a life of their own to delve more in detail into each of those points that the artist considers essential to understand the grotesque. The series of drawings with semantic visual games lead us to the appropriation in the collective feeling of imagery and words, making them familiar and even resorting to that factor of almost childish nostalgia with which to see, from the point of view of innocence, the tragedy, thus encouraging that tug of war in the tragicomic.
The ecological problem also has a place. Recently, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca signed the decree for the eradication of Pablo Escobar's hippopotamuses, more than 250 in its last census, and which has become a headache. Invasive species, the second cause of eradication of endemic fauna in the world, have in these artiodactyls a new angle for Restrepo. How to eliminate them? With the far-fetched idea in mind of dynamiting the stranded whales, the artist vindicates the absurd as a solution in a succinct, short, but tremendously visual and explanatory video art piece, complemented by the usual video game visual, counting and subtracting lives, as if it were a scoreboard to solve the problem.
Beyond the explicitness that some of Restrepo's representations may be, his proposal has a full impact due to its apparent narrative simplicity, supported by the management of the numerous techniques that he deploys and that come to surprise by the discovery of new stories that, being real, start from the eccentric, that same concept that allows this fable to play with all our senses.
Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood can be seen until October 30 at Galería La Cometa Madrid, Calle de San Lorenzo, 11, Madrid (Spain).
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