The anticipation of the storm makes us fill anxious and the atmosphere becomes dense. The walls act as dumpers for the lightnings, the rain, and the puffing of the wind. As the downpour approaches, the shelter of the buildings turns the weather into a contemplative spectacle, at times terrifying, but from which, with some luck, we will be exempt. Blinding our way through the streets, a broken sky seclusion and pause.

WE HEAR THUNDERS IN THE BACKGROUND is a curious title for this work exhibition by Sonnia Yepez, which far from the startling phrase, it consists in a soft mood and a series of punctual and strict work. Twelve white paper pieces hang on the walls of the room, clearly divided by salmon and cement tones that frame the geometry of the space. The chair, the door, and the fire extinguisher also become part of the chromatic game indicating that the exhibiting adaptation is fake, transitory: it is not a quality of the place but an easily dismantled mise-en-scène. Standing out from the false tempera of the architecture, a more organic feeling emerges from the monochrome series that is half-open to being drawing, sculpture and painting at the same time. The sculpted paintings on paper refer to a traditional exhibition, many of the frames are lavishly decorated and seem to be from an earlier era, and yet, when we look into their opacity, we only find some folds, stains, and the trace of the bubble wrap that virulently covers them.

The laborious tracing manages to confuse and seems to keep pieces, still wrapped, inside those vain decoys. The data sheets relate them to different paintings of the Escuela la Sabana, atmospheric studies of mist, fog and wide firmament that in the passage from the XIX to the XX century innovated the way of understanding landscape painting in Colombia. Then, a path of double look at the hollowness is created, starting from the wide nothingness that gives a background in these canvases to culminate in the concrete exercises of emptying. The revision between the two groups of works, which distant by more than a century, does not end in a simple formal replication, but it is a kind of call, a conceptual union through the ages. It seems as if two moments of the exhibition had merged into a single space, making these cloudy plains rise to the height of vision and confront us with the absence of their images. For all this, it seems that the artist seeks to mow the trajectory of the usual time, which we perceive as a vector that goes from the past to the future without intermediate states.

In the compendium of all of Sonnia Yepez's work, we find a sort of half-objects, sculptures that in strange ways unite two temporal or formal states of things, artifacts that seem to be in a perpetual latency of transformation that never ends. By embodying and unifying distant states of matter, these new things oscillate among various identities and can even generate a certain sense of overwhelm, as they reveal themselves against the solidity of identity, against the certainties that allow us to name things and create narratives and meanings with them. Sonnia’s exhibition is an example of this, pretending to be both past and present, skirting the edges of the usual from the permissions given by the image, and making use of poetry to channel what we believed to be definitive along another path.

Like the fog, the identities are fluid and porous. Although we can point to them from afar, as we approach, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine them and to divide them from what surrounds them. They envelop us. In the open air of the building, a banner makes the breeze visible with its undulation. The textile is printed with a cloud that matches the fluid and light nature of its support, but it contradicts its traditional use as a demarcation of territories and legislations. It would be impossible to propose as a political territory an ephemeral and aerial body of a wandering nature. The flag seems to be another attempt to understand the provisional nature of physical entities, of these half-objects that move between discordant definitions and fail to reach a full identity. Seeking to break the ideality of certain image containers, the margins of the mutable stand out throughout the exhibition by using climatological metaphors, thunders behind the walls and atmospheres full of themselves. Allegorically mowing such contingencies, we are left with closed images and transitory symbols

William Contreras Alfonso
April 2022