Edwin Monsalve. Plant Memory

The Fernando Pradilla Gallery closes its 2025 exhibition season with the new project by Colombian artist Edwin Monsalve (Medellín, 1984): Plant Memory. In his fourth exhibition in our galleries, Monsalve offers a new interpretation of the landscape and the heterogeneous forms of nature itself. His new exhibition stems from the many iterations and reflections of previous projects in which Monsalve has addressed issues surrounding fauna, flora, landscape, extraction, extinction, representation and matter. With José Celestino Mutis's Botanical Expedition as a starting point and reference for his work, Monsalve has explored, through integrated visual arts, new approaches to the fundamental theme of his work: the abstractions of the landscape, the modification of the natural environment by humankind, and the ongoing exploitation and devastation of the environment. This is evidenced by his series Expedition/Extinction, Nature and Artifice, Transmuted Nature, The Impossibility of Landscape, Topophilia, Geodesy and Orbs, among others.

From the convergence of these dialogues emerges Plant Memory, a project that draws on 17th-century landscape representations, those ink illustrations inspired by the drawings of the great expeditions that left Europe for inhospitable territories and which were compiled in the first encyclopaedias of natural sciences. With Plant Memory these images return to Europe as vestiges of those early expeditions. Through a series of canvases and drawings, Edwin Monsalve replaces the ink of the original drawings with petroleum and mineral coal, two elements produced by nature but which come in greater proportion from fossil and plant sediments, thus preserving in their DNA a plant memory, a reminiscence of everything that inhabited the planet and that we now only see as alchemical residue or as melancholic images of a past that is rapidly disappearing.

Referring to his new exhibition, Edwin Monsalve states: Kant spoke of the terrifying sublime to refer to that which is accompanied by a certain fear or melancholy. Fear or melancholy are inexorably present in this project, insofar as what we see with a certain beauty and crafted with delicate virtuosity is, at the same time, a melancholic image of the near future. By superimposing two elements (image and matter) we are inevitably placed in the terrifying present, where for now we are merely spectators or quoting Paul Auster, we could say that “These are the last things. They disappear one by one and never return. I could tell you about the ones I have seen disappear and no longer exist, but I doubt there is time for that. Now everything happens so fast, I can’t keep up.”

Edwin Monsalve’s work offers a continuous and attentive look at what the concept of landscape implies, assuming cartography as a model of critical thinking where representational and abstract notions of the universe are configured.

Edwin Monsalve lives and works in Medellín (Colombia). In 2017, he was awarded the EFG Latin American Art Award Acquisition Prize in association with ArtNexus, one of the most prestigious awards supporting the production of visual arts by contemporary Latin American artists. His work has been exhibited in various Colombian museums and institutions, including the Banco de la República Art Museum in Bogotá, the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín, and the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation in Bogotá, where in 2016 he presented his site-specific project Narcissus, which won the 4th Biennial Prize for Visual and Plastic Arts. In 2020, he was included by curator Juan Canela at the ZONA MACO SUR 2020 edition, showcasing the project Power Structures (2019-2020). He currently teaches at the University of Antioquia (Colombia).