El camino del dodo : Matías Paradela

The seven canvases included in the exhibition were produced in the artist’s characteristic naïve style. Through maximalist brushworks and a vibrant color palette, the compositions offer an anthropomorphic vision of everyday objects, particularly gas tanks. This element—distinctive of Bolivian society, where Paradela has lived for the past decade—condenses meanings linked the political, economic, and social shifts unfolding in the country, driven by the ongoing energy crisis and a scarcity of resources that has intensified over the last years. Here, this object becomes the historical subject of the end of an era; one that signals its probable disappearance. Once a symbol of modernity and progress, the gas tank is gradually approaching obsolescence and may soon come to be regarded as a vestige, much like ancient amphorae, which once fulfilled practical and commercial functions and today are considered treasures within institutional collections around the world.

Interested in the naturalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, Paradela finds resonances between his work and that of two artists who, like him, are self-taught : painter Melchor María Mercado (1816, Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata—present-day Bolivia), whose illustrations sought to depict Bolivian reality across different social strata, and painter Cándido López (1840, Buenos Aires), known for his meticulously detailed scenes of war and landscapes. Following this intuitive and personal approach to the references that inform his practice, the lateral panels of the exhibition establish, with humor, a dialogue with an iconic painting by Alex Katz, in which the gas tanks take on a stylized, almost feminine appearance, echoing Katz’s treatment of his muse and wife, Ada Katz.

El camino del dodo unfolds in Campeche as an immersive scenographic environment that reclaims and is shaped by the symbolism of yellow —the original color of gas tanks, delivery trucks, and industrial pipes in Bolivia, which historically evokes the country’s wealth and abundance, and is present as one of the colors of its national flag. The large-scale formats and the almost mural-like continuity of the works allude to the theatrical dimension of the construction of history, a process that entails the invention of myths and the worship of icons. Within this mise-en-scène, the anthropomorphized gas tanks appear as characters who, after years of being integrated into the everyday Andean landscape, are transformed into active witnesses, embodying the weight of collective memory.