Pleasure

In May 2005, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves took a trip by road, river and horseback through parts of Colombia, Ecuador. Venezuela and northern Peru. During the one hundred days of their travels, the artists recorded different perceptions of each place they visited by way of drawings. Emulating the nineteenth-century travelling artists who crossed wide oceans to record the new customs they found along their way, Mantilla and Chaves created the central element of their work out of the singular space where the existing place meets with the one invented along the way. In their travels, during which the artists sought to record what could be understood as “Latin America,” they noticed that the phrase “El Placer” [Pleasure] was often present in the names of streets, districts and villages. They decided to reproduce this phrase as homage to their trip and to evoke the expectation that a place with such a name generates in counterpoint to the real encounter with that locale. The piece –which is outstanding among the many works, mainly drawings, that compose the project Dibujando América– re-creates a form of popular advertisement that the artists use as a support to reproduce various images that reflect the construction of a vast appropriated landscape.