'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'
'Cambalache'

'Cambalache'

Jhafis Quintero

23 Apr - 31 May 2014

What is the relationship between prison graffiti and the paintings of the cavemen? What tips are as useful in real life and as in a life deprived of freedom? What do convicts crave the most while incarcerated apart form their release? What art and crime alike? The Panamanian artist Jhafis Quintero raises and answers these questions and many others in his first solo exhibition in Spain: 'Cambalache', which in prison jargon stands for “day to day in prison”.

The experience of ten years of confinement in a prison in Costa Rica plays a major role in Quintero’s work. His artistic practice stems from his personal experiences in the world of incarceration, exclusion, silence, insecurity and loneliness, but also from imagination and creativity aimed at finding means of survival.

There is a particular perception of time and its implications for a body dipped in a certain period of time and space; it is a matter of physical and mental limits, and a constant reflection on death that hangs over the lives of the inmates, that conferes to Quinteros‘ work an extremely poetic dimension.

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Works in the exhibition