Ninfo, Te Quiero: Juan Arango Palacios

Galerie Revel is thrilled to present Ninfo, Te Quiero, the first solo exhibition in France of Juan Arango Palacios. Born in Colombia and based in Chicago, Palacios' practice examines the entangled histories of longing, belonging, and diaspora within a pictorial realm that blurs the line between reverie and reality.

How do we render and make sense of a place that remains elusive and unreachable? If our connection had not been severed, what might our lives look like today? In Ninfo, Te Quiero, Palacios lingers on these questions as he conjures a Colombian imaginary where themes of identity, intimacy, and queerness intertwine. The title, a tender declaration and a nod to the novel Tengo miedo, torero (My Tender Matador) by Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, articulates the delicately radical reality of queer life in Latin America. In this body of work, which spans both painting and textile weaving, each piece reframes Colombia as a mythic landscape. Honest, whimsical, suspended somewhere between dream, memory, and truth. 

Palacios' paintings depict enigmatic male figures that exist as both muses and shadowed reflections in a world of sensuality, solitude, and lingering tension. Intrigue and discretion envelop them as they seek moments of solace, cruising within the protection of the guadua or embracing beneath the night's silent gaze. Are the figures attracted to one another, jealous, or suspicious of each other-or all of the above? Through his signature gaze, Palacios captures the complexities characteristic of queer desire and invites viewers to bear witness to these charged encounters.

Palacios invokes the literary strategies of magical realism to establish a unique, hazy relationship between his figures and their surroundings. Across his pictorial practice, he references locations that feel specific and familiar, but remain illusory. Secret places that are accessible only to those who are in the know. Nature looms large in Palacios' images, sometimes enveloping the figures and thus granting them privacy, and other times the figures themselves metamorphosing into mountains, rivers, or foliage. His attention to detail in clothing, tattoos, movement and overall world-making contribute to the sentiment that his works are codes waiting to be deciphered. In so doing, Palacios crafts images that are stunningly literary, making room for reading, misreading, and the potential of an unreliable narrator reminiscent of a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

Within these works lies a sincere and ongoing engagement with Latin American cultural history, queered through Palacios' diasporic lens. Informed by the visual legacies of artists like Tarsila do Aramal, Débora Arango, Camilo Egas and Saturnino Herrán,  his art confronts the weight of tradition, machismo, and conservative societal norms while envisioning an alternative. Through Ninfo, Te Quiero, Palacios turns inward, re-examining his relationship with his homeland and exploring how love, longing, and desire endure amidst complexity and contradiction. In this way, these pieces serve as subtle self-portraits from a hypothetical universe. One to which Palacios reaches out in mourning, curiosity, and love for his country, and in that very act, conjures a new realm that is distinctly his own.

Text by Max Diallo Jakobsen.