Danilo Dueñas. The Reparation of Vision

Danilo Dueñas: The Reparation of Vision
September 16–December 22, 2017
Opening: Saturday, September 16, 5:30pm

Curator: Garance Chabert, Director of Centre d’art contemporain la Villa du Parc

As part of the France-Colombia 2017 program, the two French contemporary art centers of La Villa du Parc and La Halle des Bouchers are pleased to host the first solo shows in France of two major artists from Colombia’s art scene, Danilo Dueñas in Annemasse and Juan Fernando Herrán in Vienne.

La Villa du Parc, the contemporary art center of Annemasse—the city bordering Geneva—is featuring the first solo show in France of Danilo Dueñas (b. 1956, lives and works in Bogotá). Called The Reparation of Vision, the show is entirely conceived and produced for the Villa du Parc galleries and the context of a French setting. It blends objects having a strong cultural connotation (the French billiard, the Persian rugs, the Swiss abstract sculptures) and salvaged materials collected around the art center’s specific geographic and institutional location.

Dueñas’s art is suffused with the artist’s strong sympathy for the world around him. Objects that are observed, found, salvaged, and assembled form the basis of a practice that assumes many forms, i.e., pictures, sculptures, and installations. Taking into account the context of both the architecture and the exhibition as a work in itself is an approach that gradually came to dominate his art as Dueñas broadened the conditions of visibility, interaction, and balance between his pieces.

Reparation of Vision is indeed the announced intention of Dueñas’ exhibition at Villa du Parc: “Therefore the reparation of vision is trying to be vigilant in the before. The before is ours, it is the world’s possibility, which we must nourish and feed. Taking account of color, of layers, of time in the gaze.” (Danilo Dueñas)

Well known in Latin America and the United States, Danilo Dueñas has also regularly shown in Germany, where he was the guest artist of the DAAD Gallery in 2011. His work is seen in the most important art institutions of Colombia, where he is also a professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. He is represented by the galleries Casas Riegner in Bogotá and Thomas Schulte in Berlin. His work is currently exhibited in Pivo (São Paulo, Brazil) during the summer and he is also invited as an artist-in-residence by the Frac Pays de la Loire in Carquefou (France) between October and December 2017.