Adriana Duque Manizales, Colombia, b. 1968

The artist Adriana Duque practices a photographic mannerism that explores staged realities of the social landscape. Her photographic "pictures" are a staging of her own inspiration, whose common denominator lies in the encounters and contrasts between Western high culture and its myths with the spatial and social dystopia of her country. The photographic image of his work refers to painting, theatre, literature and cinema. Through it one perceives the silence of painting, the light of cinema, the immediacy of theatre and the superficiality of the advertising image; they are fictitious performances staged for the camera and later constructed on the computer, creating a claustrophobic and hermetic world of illusion and estrangement.

In this artist's images there is a continuous confrontation between realism and fantasy. They announce that the real can only be captured in its essence through simulation. The idea is the authentic and the image is the fiction. Although it seems to prove otherwise, his work does not have a specific narrative, but develops in a series of suggested actions: more through the implications of the image than through its descriptions. The content of these multiple layers suggests structures of understanding sometimes too bizarre to be real that end up reinforcing the sense of mischief and intrigue they arouse in the viewer. Like the work of other contemporary photographers, the scenes in his work are full of subjective meanings in which every symbol is loaded and every connection is perverse. This emphasis on the psychic role ends up producing the reverse, and the elaborate symbolic structure fatigues coherence and suggests the impossibility or refusal to believe in the organising principles of the characters and the story.

Carlos E. Betancourt