La Piel del Amazonas
(Amazon Skin)
Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, La piel del Amazonas (Amazon Skin). This body of work, taken by Peruvian photographer Javier Silva Meinel, explores the rainforests of the Amazon Basin, where native communities still follow an ancient vision and adhere to customs and traditions that defy the parameters of our western world view.
Javier Silva possesses a rare gift that allows him to transform reality when he looks through the eye of his camera. The photograph of a Peruvian Indian covered in little fish recalls the effigy of the Virgin carried in the processions of towns throughout Peru, whose richly ornamented garments evoke the Baroque past. Other portraits reveal compositions in which men and animals incite strange associations in our memory. As a restless spirit and indefatigable traveler, Silva has journeyed down the intricate roads of his country to remote areas, always opting to concentrate on the inhabitants of those uncharted lands.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Silva’s work is the dialogue he has established with the individuals he photographs. The subjects participate in the photographer’s orchestrated recreation with a natural disposition that reinforces the mood of the images. His creative gaze moves beyond the frame of an anthropological document, activating the springs of our imagination by forging a new reality based on the strong bond of Amazon inhabitants with their environment, especially with the fauna. The images recall bestiaries and fables in which extraordinary mythological beings appear, although not for the purpose of reflecting a real magical religious universe. They exist in the artist’s imagination, as his final product demonstrates. Clearly, these images owe much to the inventiveness of the photographer, but also to his extraordinary complicity with the native population. The curious paradox is that when the two different world visions come face-to-face in the creation of a ritual before the camera, we get a glimpse of the authentic, mysterious and ungraspable skin of the Amazon.
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