Gonzalo Fuenmayor on Tropical Baroque, Charcoal, and Cultural Paradoxes

Inside the Surreal Landscapes of Gonzalo Fuenmayor

For fine artist and draughtsman Gonzalo Fuenmayor, tropical identity is far from a static postcard, it is a complex dialogue defined by historical entanglement and aesthetic tension. Working across massive scales with nothing more than charcoal, Fuenmayor challenges colonial narratives, European refinement, and the manufactured fantasies of the tropics.

From his roots in Colombia to his current studio practice in Miami, his striking compositions force viewers to move past initial wonder into a deeper, more unsettling uncertainty. Here, we sit down with the artist to discuss how humor, irony, and chiaroscuro breathe new life into contemporary drawing.

In Conversation With Gonzalo Fuenmayor

IRK: Your work is often described as “Tropical Baroque.” How do you bridge the extravagant, ornate European aesthetics with the raw, vibrant energy of your Colombian roots?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: I’m interested less in bridging those two worlds than in creating friction between them. Growing up in Colombia, and later living in the United States, made me very aware of how ideas of taste, sophistication, and cultural identity are constructed.

I bring those visual languages together because they are already historically entangled. The chandeliers, elaborate interiors, tropical vegetation, and fruit become part of a vocabulary through which I can examine cultural hierarchy, desire, and belonging.

IRK: Bananas and crystal chandeliers frequently collide in your large-scale charcoal drawings. What is the story behind pairing everyday tropical symbols with symbols of elite luxury?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: For Colombia and much of Latin America, the banana ties directly into histories of foreign intervention, extraction, labor, and the construction of the tropics as a consumable fantasy.

The chandelier operates almost at the opposite end of the symbolic spectrum: refinement, European taste, wealth, spectacle. Bringing them together allowed me to create a hybrid image in which opulence and decadence become entangled—and ultimately complicit.

Gonzalo Fuenmayor on Charcoal, Monochrome, and Colonial Shadows

IRK: You work almost exclusively in large-scale charcoal. Why charcoal, and how do you achieve such striking, almost photographic light within a strictly monochrome palette?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: For many years, charcoal has been central to my practice because it is both incredibly direct and remarkably versatile. It is essentially burnt material, yet it can produce an enormous range—from deep, velvety blacks to extremely delicate light. I like that contradiction between the modesty of the material and the opulence of the images I construct with it.

Charcoal also provided a way to challenge predetermined notions of what Latin American culture should look like—colorful, joyful, exuberant. Working in monochrome allowed me to resist those expectations. Chiaroscuro, and particularly the use of light to construct volume and space, became increasingly important to the work. More recently, painting has begun to complicate that relationship to monochrome.

IRK: Many of your compositions feel like cinematic dreamscapes or surrealist stages. How much of your imagery comes from memory versus pure imagination?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Cinema has certainly influenced the way I think about light, scale, atmosphere, and staging. I want the spaces to feel plausible enough that you might enter them, but strange enough that something remains unresolved.

My compositions usually begin with the experience of an actual space. Collage then mediates that experience by bringing different images and references together, and finally articulates it through light and shadow. I’m interested in constructing absurd spaces that feel entirely plausible, even though they could never quite exist.

IRK: Humor and irony play a subtle yet powerful role in your visual language. How do you balance absurdity with serious artistic critique?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Humor allows me to approach difficult subjects without turning the work into an illustration of an argument. It is also a way of highlighting the absurdity already embedded in some of these cultural contradictions.

I’m not interested in delivering a moral or a single interpretation. Irony is useful precisely because it keeps the image unstable. It allows seduction and critique, beauty and discomfort, to coexist.

IRK: Scale is a defining element of your installations and drawings. How does changing the physical size of an artwork alter the viewer’s psychological connection to it?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Scale changes the relationship from looking at an image to physically confronting it.

With the large drawings, I want the viewer’s body to become part of the experience. You can’t absorb the entire work at once. You have to move, adjust your distance, and negotiate the space.

That loss of a comfortable viewing position interests me. Monumental scale can be seductive and spectacular, but it can also make the viewer feel vulnerable. Increasingly, I’m interested not only in making large images but in allowing the work itself to occupy and reorganize the architectural space it inhabits.

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Miami, Migration, and Tropical Paradoxes

IRK: Living and working in Miami, how does the cultural landscape of the city influence your ongoing dialogue between tropical identity and global art movements?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: Miami is an interesting place because the tropical here is both completely real and highly manufactured. It is climate and vegetation, but it is also architecture, tourism, luxury, real estate, fantasy, and branding. That contradiction resonates strongly with my work.

Migration, particularly from Latin America and the Caribbean, also shapes the city, where identities constantly translate, assimilate, and reinvent themselves. Having lived in the United States for more than twenty-five years, I’m increasingly interested in those processes, not simply in what it means to come from somewhere, but in what happens when cultural references become naturalized somewhere else.

IRK: If someone is stepping into your universe for the very first time, what emotion or single thought do you hope hits them first?

Gonzalo Fuenmayor: I would probably choose “wonder”.

I want there to be an immediate moment of seduction, something excessive, strange, or even familiar. However, the longer you stay with the work, the more I hope that initial attraction begins to destabilize. Gradually, what seemed beautiful might become excessive; meanwhile, what seemed humorous might reveal a darker history; and ultimately, what seemed familiar might begin to feel strange.

For me, that transition, from wonder to uncertainty, is where the work really begins.

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