Emanuel Tovar: Viaje Inmaterial

Páramo is pleased to present the exhibition Viaje Inmaterial by Emanuel Tovar. The artist examines the vulnerabilities of human existence in a social and cultural context, and this exhibition features a new body of work inspired by Dante Alighieri’sThe Divine Comedy. Drawing from this narrative, Tovar has created video, sculpture, painting, and performance that reflect his own quest—a viaje inmaterial—to find existence and meaning in the afterlife.

Tovar is interested in personal will and the forces that work against it. In this new exhibition, he also explores such fundamental dichotomies as creation and destruction, shadow and light, beauty and decay, and life and death. A series of burnt pages from “Canto V” in the Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, form a polyptych leading into a gallery where Viaje Inmaterial, a video that is the title piece of the show, is on view. In this eight-minute work, the artist—making direct reference to Charon, the ferryman who takes Dante across the Acheron River and into Hell—slowly paddles his boat in increasingly smaller circles until ultimately disappearing into the lake as night falls and the scene is enveloped in darkness.

Tovar has also created Paisaje Metafísico, a series of dense, black monochromatic oil paintings that are a meditation on the past, the present, and nothingness. Inspired by José Clemente Orozco’s painting of the same name, Tovar also acknowledges the Minimalist “last paintings” of Ad Reinhardt as he seeks to convey the emptiness that is an inherent part of human existence. The architectural lines and planes in Tovar’s works yield differentiating configurations of shifting textures and forms that evoke a sense of memory and loss.