Chanoir. El Colgado

Bogotá's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo presents, from January 31st through March 14th, the exhibition El Colgado, curated by Juan David Quintero Arbeláez and featuring the work of French-Colombian graffiti artist Chanoir. El Colgado is a retrospective reviewing Chanoir's trajectory as a visual artist in sculpture, graffiti and video over twenty years of work in urban spaces, museums, and commercial circuits in Europe, the US, and Colombia. The exhibition explores and invites visitors to reflect on the means employed by institutions and communities to appropriate Chanoir's work, with the intention of including the processes of graffiti art in Bogotá's institutional, communal, and local fields, particularly the Minuto de Dios area, which besides being a zone of influence by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, is a graffiti-intensive neighborhood, its façades clandestinely covered and even, in some cases, loaned by their proprietors to be intervened (painted). These actions demonstrate the way in which the community has gradually made graffiti its own as an artistic practice. The figures of a black cat, and icon and referent he has deployed in many streets around the world, is the coherent communicating thread in Chanoir's life as an artist. His cats are adapted to the different spaces with a naïf style characterized by its forceful colors. In the words of the show's curator, Chanoir's work "becomes a child's game that also bases its explorations on sculpture and video, revisiting American and Japanese pop-culture characters like Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Mazinger Z, among others. As Pablo Neruda said: "a child who does not play is not a child, but a man who doesn't play has forever lost the child inside him, whom he deeply needs". In other words, this is an invitation to play, to return to our childhood and be again those children we always were but have forgotten in the course of our lives. For more information: prensamacbogota@gmail.com