The Market is a series that was inspired by the poem Alheña y Azúmbar by the Colombian poet Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, also known as X-504. Jaramillo’s poem is an ode to the fruit of my childhood – the poet invokes each fruit in turn and attributes to it a mythology, an idiosyncrasy, a hazard. In this poem, the fruits are offered up; they come with advice and histories. They are dangerous and familiar at the same time. They are delicious fruit that tell a sometimes terrible history.
The idea came to me of telling the story of these fruit in my own way. I would display each fruit separately – the way they do in stalls in markets all over the world. I thought of them as small paintings, easy, pleasing almost, and without pretensions. They would be the familiar and accessible fare of everyday life but seen in a new way, abstracted into new objects and new forms. The fruit in my paintings would also tell a story, a story about their colors and their forms and where those colors and forms would take me. Like in much of my work, my aim is to communicate an abstraction that is nonetheless intimate. An intimate abstraction. Enjoy the harvest.