Individual Exhibitions

EL EMPATE – Juan David Laserna Montoya

Plural Nodo Cultural presents its first solo exhibition since it opened its doors to the public in 2018:

“El empate” by Juan David Laserna Montoya, is a site-specific proposal composed solely of drawings in charcoal on paper; It is an installation built from two-dimensional pieces of outstanding formal quality. The intention of Laserna Montoya is that these drawings, after his life in the exhibition, disappear, which turns the exhibition space into a kind of mausoleum where the viewer will witness a life full of incongruities, humor, tragedy and beauty.

With the initial idea of ​​resuming a drawing/sketching routine as an exercise in creation without a specific objective, the images emerge one after another, avoiding through them an encompassing story, since the artist does not want it to dictate the course of his production. The resulting drawings appreciated individually or in association with others suggest absurd, tragic and funny yet familiar thoughts; the randomness gives them cohesion, but not meaning: the objective, far from misleading is to entice a free appreciation where the cultural features permeated by the mass media, modern history, religion and social inconformity will play an important role.

The set up in the space challenges linear narratives and invites the viewer to wander around, to bring to the present their own stories that take place in this tumult of visual information. The texts that accompany the installation are fragments taken from historic texts by multiple authors and invented phrases that make a slight reference to the imminent death of those drawings, to the individual value of each image and to the installation as a sum of situations.

Writing Contest

As part of the project, we developed a writing contest that sought to encourage the public the interpretation of the drawings in the exhibition. The result was a fanzine that contains the six finalists.

Additionally, on the second floor of Plural, Nacionalista Doméstica is presented: a series of prints made especially for this exhibition and which he made collectively with Taller Circular (Bogotá).