Water and Gold

From the exhibit Water and Gold by Maia Ibar and Baptiste Ibar at La Residencia. Bogota, Colombia, February 18 - March 18, 2010
Text by Natalia Valencia, Curator*

The drawings that Maia Ibar and Baptiste Ibar do in Bogota are full of water. Although they haven't lived through the seasons of heavy rain in the city, which are so particularly beautiful and which crush your heart a little bit. They haven't lived through them because they had never been here before, but it feels as if they had.
Because the water that they color carries the same feeling of this place, especially when it is tinted with those intense golden sparkles.
Just like the greyish blue skies that menace us in the afternoons and which are suddenly pierced by intense golden light, as if God were pointing as us with a divine flashlight.
To inhabit these landscapes, they invented the perfect creature, bicephalous and amphibian, apt to navigate the puddles of the city and then doze off in the sun in a savannah field. They both live In this creature, as in the other entities that they bring in their visit and which we perceive between the water and the sun, the feathers and the music.
And this is when we think that nothing seems more beautiful than knowing that in the purest imagination of these visitors we can find something so familiar and yet, so strange.