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Artwork Description

In Sotará (2025), Evelyn Tovar expands her Transitory Series, a body of work in which she reinterprets early twentieth-century postcards and visual records that shaped Colombia’s national imaginary. These images—originally produced to circulate idealized and exoticized visions of the Andean landscape—are reappropriated by the artist as surfaces of memory, critique, and historical reassessment. The work depicts the Sotará volcano, located in Cauca and known as the “Sleeping Lion,” a sacred territory for the Nasa people. Through the use of metallic leaf on yellow silk screen, Tovar traces mountains, vegetation, and topography with a restrained and deliberate gesture. The yellow background operates not merely as a chromatic field, but as a direct reference to the myths of El Dorado and the colonial systems that framed the landscape as a site of wealth, extraction, and economic promise. Gold introduces a fundamental tension between permanence and fragility. While the material evokes durability and value, its application onto a silkscreened image underscores the distance between the physical territory and its mediated representation. In this way, Sotará becomes a critical reflection on how Andean landscapes have been symbolized, domesticated, and, in many cases, replaced by their images within contexts marked by mining and agricultural exploitation. Rather than offering a traditional landscape depiction, the work proposes an understanding of landscape as a cultural and political construction, where memory, territory, and representation converge on a surface that reveals both symbolic persistence and material transformation.