El Conuco de Marcos | Kopë Kë Theka | En la ruta de Cova

2022 onwards

The paintings in this group form a body of work in a process that overlapped over a period of a several years, unfolding across different formats and scales. El Conuco de Marcos began with visits to a friend’s allotment in the outskirts of Caracas in 2024. The canvases and small studies made after, are close to field notes: quick variations on the theme of the steep hillside, the density of cultivated growth, isolated details of plants, and most importantly and attempt to reflect in paintings the almost excessive fertility of a difficult ground that produces generously.
En la Ruta de Cova: These paintings stem from and blend with the previous one rather than forming a separate block. They grew out of reading La vorágine (The Vortex), the 1923 modernist novel by José Eustasio Rivera, about the violence of rubber extraction in the Colombo-Venezuelan Amazon at the beginning of the 20th Century. But they are not specifically about that, but rather about the second chapter of the book, where language becomes jungle—baroque, sticky and overwhelming. Out of that transition come certain paintings that didn´t stay in the same palette of colours and theme, and became something else.
In Kopë Kë Theka, painting drove the process naturally, bringing Gili to study the system of slash-and-burn used in many conucos (kopë kë theka in Yanomami). Burned ground as both interruption and promise—apparent death and future fertility; an agricultural gesture that crosses cultures and time.