29 Jun 2018

Jhafis Quintero: Una serie de eventos desafortunados en el pasado me obligaban en el presente a comer deprisa

Diablo Rosso

Reviewed by Joel Winkelman

Jhafis Quintero's etchings on copper illustrate lessons from a Costa Rican prison during a ten-year incarceration. In one, the back of a person's head appears, the hair resembling layers of an onion, before a nearly empty clock. Text below advises forgetting important dates because time is the great torturer. Rather than emerging slowly, boredom proudly announces itself as a thematic axis.

Violence and menace form the other axis. Whereas boredom is an abstraction, violence erupts from a discrete geography. "If any cops fuck with you, kill one of the easily found rats and put its corpse near a police lookout; the smell of its corpse will convince him to change his bad attitude," reads one etching in Spanish slang beneath an illustration of a dead rat next to a tin-roof hut.

Human faces, when they appear, stare plaintively into space without an audience, either external or internal. The figures embody an aggressive desperation and isolation that transfers to the viewer.