Opening: Saturday, August 23th, 6 p.m Gary Vera engages in a critical dialogue with a series of watercolors by Joaquín Pinto, a 19th-century Ecuadorian genre painter who portrayed individuals marked by social and racial inequality. Pinto depicted them through a lens that naturalized their condition of marginality, showing them as subordinate figures within the national imaginary. Presented at the Museo del Barro, this project offers a reinterpretation of the visual tradition from a contemporary Latin American perspective, where tensions between history, representation and power remain prevalent. Vera appropriates the aesthetics and watercolor technique associated with 19th-century chroniclers to create a new iconography of the popular body. Using media files and records of social demonstrations in Ecuador, the artist portrays contemporary demonstrators as active participants who occupy the public space as agents of transformation, rather than as objects of observation. By reversing the logic of genre art, Vera turns the chronicle into a political gesture and watercolor into a tool for active memory. He draws connections between images from the past and contemporary forms of protest that continue to fight for the right to exist, to be recognized and to claim a place in history.
Image: Gary Vera, Manifestante, 2024