Luis Cobelo 'Zurumbático' Gallery Opening & Artist Talk | Friday, March 18, 2022, 7:30pm
> This exhibition will be on display through Friday, May 27, 2022.
When: Friday, March 18, 2022 from 7:30 - 9:30 PM
Where: Leica Store Miami, 372 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, Florida, 33134, United States (Paid street parking available, or, garage parking ($1.25/hr) available behind the store located on Andalusia Ave across from Publix.)
Artist: Luis Cobelo
Says Cobelo of his work:
Zurumbático is a never-ending journey to the place where writer Gabriel García Márquez's book ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was born. A story full of the lifeblood that permeates thousands of Latin American little towns, the roots of that giant empirical hemisphere - passionate, forgotten, fickle, violent and, above all, happy. Aracataca is the country where Gabriel García was born and which inspired his original Macondo. This place, and the surrounding geographical area in this Caribbean part of Colombia, was my starting point.
"The book was my leitmotiv and what emerged was a set of spontaneous and original images: a process of intimate, poetical, magical, dreamlike and sometimes painful self-examination loaded with symbolism and enigmatic stories linked to this way of being a 'continent’, that for me meant a rebirth as a person, as an individual who is nurtured by this bleeding, Latin-American spinal cord.
"Zurumbático" is a dimension, where everything that you can think of (and even those things you could not think of) become possible. Is also a tunnel of feelings, sensations, effects and special events that I enter and exit whenever I choose. Submerged in this dimension, I came to understand, to reconfirm, that all that is extraordinary, unusual or commonplace in life, the comic and even the tragic, has no explanation. We should not ask for one and we should not seek one. That's all. Reality or not, It is what it is.
“Zurumbático” means "a person who acts silly, clumsy, foolishly. Someone who is stunned, slow, somber, melancholic, enigmatic, half drunk, half mad, and with a bad or inconstant temper. It's also the sensation of a trance."
About Luis:
Luis Cobelo was born in Venezuela and is currently based in San Francisco, California. He was raised and became a photographer between Venezuela and Spain. Luis studied philosophy at the University of Zulia. Beginning in 1993, he participated in numerous international photography festivals and solo exhibitions.
Working independently across borders since 2001, Luis has developed documentary projects in the Americas, Asia and Europe, and has been published in many magazines and newspapers worldwide. His work is focused on South American culture, where he created his first photobook “Zurumbático”, to reveal the magical spirit of this part of the world.
The book (shortlisted in PhotoEspaña, Arles and Burn among others) has fascinated people around the globe, and the exhibition of this work has traveled across oceans (between 2017 to the present) to Italy, México, the United States, Spain, Costa Rica, Portugal, Venezuela and the Netherlands. The project was featured in Lens Culture, discussing how Cobelo takes his cues from the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most well-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Luis's work was also featured on the Leica Camera Blog, in LFI online and in the May 2019 edition of LFI Magazine.
another collection of fantasies, mysteries and magical stories from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He is currently working on a third ongoing project called “Te Amo” (a collection of 10 publications) that explores certain aspects, from a personal, sarcastic, serious and ironic perspective of Latin American machismo through the Mexican fotonovela.
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