I IMAGINE THEN I EXIST

Imagino luego existo
I imagine then I exist

A six-painting exhibition selection from the ongoing series IN THE NAME OF THE EARTH

Imagino luego existo was Óscar Berrío’s first solo exhibition at N.A.ME, presented during his artist residency in Brooklyn from June 14 through August 18, 2024. The exhibition brought together six monumental paintings from IN THE NAME OF THE EARTH, an ongoing pictorial epic developed from a vast body of drawings made over several years.

Across these works, human figures, animals, plants, cities, machines and invented signs inhabit the same unstable world. Bodies become landscapes; beasts carry other beings; cities rise from living masses; marks move between writing and image. No single figure occupies the center for long. Each painting unfolds as a field of encounters in which forms appear, disappear and transform into one another.

The exhibition title—Imagino luego existo (I imagine, therefore I exist)—proposes imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a force through which reality is continuously perceived and remade. The paintings bring together the natural, spiritual, urban and political without separating them into fixed categories. Tenderness coexists with violence, humor with dread, and the vitality of the living world with the pressures of extraction, consumption and metropolitan life.

Rendered primarily in black and white, with traces of red, the works combine commanding silhouettes with dense networks of lines, pictographs and reversed writing. Acrylic is drawn directly onto gardening weed barrier fabric and pushed through its woven surface, allowing the support to participate in the formation of the image.

Presented at N.A.ME as two triptychs and joined by a mural painted directly on the gallery wall, these six paintings formed one exhibition constellation within a much larger and still-expanding body of work. Together, they invite the viewer not to decode a closed symbolic language, but to enter a world in which every form remains alive to another possible existence.