"Marx made the term 'phantasmagoria' famous, using it to describe the world of commodities which, in their mere visible presence, conceal all traces of labor that produced them. The phantasmagoria cast a veil over the production process and, like mood paintings, encourages their viewers to identify them with subjective dreams and fantasies.

Susan Buck-Morss

Although it sounds poetic, it is still true that there have been empires built by the power of color. Gold, of course, has been the most persecuted since antiquity and has always been given a powerful economic and symbolic value by the consensus of humanity. The Phoenicians became rich by supplying the ancient world with the purple obtained from its beaches, and the Spanish in colonial times came to seize the monopoly of the Mexican red extracted from the nopales, which they sold at a price higher than that of gold itself.

That poetic idea is not alien to today's world. A large part of industrially produced food products contains tartrazine, a substance that gives color artificially to drinks, sweets and even meat, and which, thanks to its powerful appeal to consumers, generates multimillion-dollar incomes for emporiums that benefit from indiscriminate use of this chemical. The empire of color even infiltrates into political spheres, issuing and evading legislation to continue using the dye despite its proven toxicity. The paradox of power is that it is the consumers -for whom everything enters through their eyes- the ones that grant control to those emporiums in their unconscious and instinctive decisions, which reaffirms the idea that as long as color continues to govern the depths of The mind of humanity will also continue to dominate the world.

Like a modern alchemist, Alejandro Sánchez experiments with tartrazine turning it into a pigment and the napkin into support, a symbolic decision by the artist that reinforces the link between his works and his inquiry into the construction of those economic empires. These materials are used to build images that nostalgically review the past of cities throughout modernization, especially the flourishing mid-century Bogotá. But what from a distance appears to be a hyperreal copy of the photographs of yesteryear is, seen up close, a topographical pattern of mountains that is repeated along the entire surface. Thus, Sánchez's painting becomes a hypnotic visual illusion and remains a ghostly image in the middle of both distances. By far, the portrait of a nation that builds its progress conceives it as infrastructure and city. Up close -reading between the lines- the wealthy landscape is constructed and supplanted with an artificial tint, as an allegory to the colonization of multinationals in the national territory.

That is why Fantasmagoría questions the veracity of the images and the story they tell us. As in Sánchez's compelling images, history and the paradoxes of power depend on where you look at them.

Christian Padilla, Art historian and curator