Aesthetics Center

Christian Bendayán has used Amazonian tropicality as a powerful lens for approaching the new popular urban culture and its displaced yet powerful aesthetics, incorporating it to the new imagery of the visual arts. Investigating the scenes and characters of a marginality defined, on the one hand, by the legendary inaccessibility of the city of Iquitos –which can only be reached by air or river– and, on the other, by the development of an urban-Amazonian subculture, it seems that Bendayán has not only imposed a view of urban Amazonia, but has also made this extreme place into a scenario imbued with the strident colors of popular painting, whose themes inform it and to whose protagonists it offers new and wide spaces in the renovated Peruvian cultural scene. (TC)