Wilfredo Prieto

"Neblina alrededor del árbol" constitutes a new approach by Wilfredo Prieto to the two-dimensional image and the landscape. The exhibition brings together a series of works produced during his stay in Lima, in which the artist has used images generated with Artificial Intelligence and printed on canvas, subsequently intervened with plastic bottle caps collected from different parts of the city. The project stems from an investigation into the nature of the contemporary image and the ways in which we construct our perception of reality. The use of AI allows Prieto to work with images that do not document an existing place, but rather reproduce the visual codes associated with the representation of landscape. They are recognizable, technically convincing, and devoid of a specific location. In a way, they resemble those landscape photographs that have circulated for years as default images in operating systems, such as Windows desktop backgrounds: scenes that function as generic representations of nature and beauty, detached from any particular experience or territory. Their neutrality responds to the artist’s interest in producing an image without an individual style. It is precisely this condition of the image that allows Prieto to return to painting. By transferring these scenes onto canvas, he reclaims a medium historically associated with the representation of landscape and brings a pictorial tradition into contact with a contemporary system of image production. The atmosphere, composition, and idealized nature remain, but they no longer respond to an artist’s gaze upon a territory; instead, they are constructed through a technological process capable of producing infinite versions of a possible reality. The plastic bottle caps introduce the context of Lima into these scenes. Collected from the streets, they are objects associated with consumption and disposal, but they are also part of practices of recycling, solidarity, and subsistence. Prieto is interested in the gesture of the collector: picking up, sorting, and accumulating everything that has been discarded. Once incorporated into the landscape, these elements introduce a dimension of abstraction into the image and establish a relationship with collecting and with the ways in which objects acquire value through their selection and accumulation. This same operation of selection underlies Prieto’s relationship with the image and with authorship. The artist has expressed an interest in producing images that move away from the notion of individual style and could potentially belong to anyone. AI allows him to work from this distance: he establishes conditions, generates possibilities, and selects the images that will become part of the work. The bottle caps follow a similar process, though from a material dimension: they are found, selected, and ultimately arranged on the canvas. In both cases, the work is constructed from that which the artist chooses to collect, separate, and bring into relation. "Neblina alrededor del árbol" continues a constant concern within Prieto’s practice: generating meaning through minimal gestures and questioning everything we take for granted. The exhibition thus explores the ways in which we construct value, authorship, and representation, and how these categories are shaped by social and political dimensions. By bringing together an artificially produced image with materials recovered from everyday life, Prieto offers a critical perspective on the systems that determine which images we recognize, which objects we preserve, and the place we assign to them. Tarissa Revilla