Between Innocence and Digital Saturation

The Colombian-British artist's new exhibition transforms the gallery into a universe of visual layers, where childlike playfulness and the chaos of the digital world intersect to offer a unique pictorial experience.

Alejandro Ospina invites us into The Kingdom in the Middle, his latest solo exhibition, which transforms La Cometa Gallery’s Miami location into an expanded field where the pictorial and the digital merge in a non-hierarchical dialogue. In this show—open to the public from May 9 through July 5, 2025—the Colombian artist presents a series of works that inhabit an ambiguous space where playfulness, spontaneous gestures, and social iconography intertwine.

At a time when art is constantly battling the visual obsolescence imposed by algorithms, Ospina succeeds in creating a language that neither rejects nor submits to the digital realm. His works seem to float between worlds, operating from a place of ambiguity and formal hybridity. From this uncertain space, he crafts a singular poetics that has positioned him as one of the most original voices in contemporary Colombian art.

Chaos as Method

The Kingdom in the Middle is built on a structural logic: accumulation. Ospina’s works are born out of excess, visual noise, and the constant flow of information that surrounds us. Through a process of image appropriation—drawing from social media, video games, television, memes, news, and children’s drawings—the artist constructs pictorial compositions that emulate the dizzying experience of digital navigation. Each canvas functions as a kind of palimpsest, a surface where layers of meaning, history, and emotion coexist.

Through digital saturation, Ospina dives into this sea of stimuli with an almost archaeological approach, salvaging fragments to reconfigure them into new visual constellations. The result is a series of pieces that feel simultaneously spontaneous and intricately crafted, as though childhood, art history, and internet iconography collapse into a single image.

Childhood as Poetic Territory

One of the exhibition’s most moving gestures is the incorporation of drawings made by the artist’s children. Childhood imagination—understood here as a space free of hierarchy—serves to counterbalance the vertical logic of adult, digital, and self-referential narratives.

Works such as Magical Thinking/Buenas Noches XII and Magical Thinking Down the Garden Path embody this hybrid approach. In them, fantastical shapes coexist with innocent strokes, references to modern art (like the works of Arshile Gorky or Joan Miró), and symbols evoking graphic interfaces or virtual landscapes. It is a realm of multiple translations, where the personal blends with the collective, and childhood becomes a plastic resource.

This presence of the childlike also challenges notions of authorship and artistic genius. Ospina transcends the ego of the artist to create a collaborative, affective, and open-ended process. Childhood becomes a provocation: what if contemporary art allowed itself to be contaminated by the playful, unpredictable, and radically free logic of children?

Technique and Tactility in the Post-Digital Age

While Ospina’s visual universe constantly references the digital world, his work insists on materiality. The technique he employs—a combination of digital tools with painting on canvas—places him in the fertile realm of mixed media, where technological precision meets the manual gesture. Each piece carries a physicality that challenges the flat image of the screen.

This commitment to tactility aligns him with a generation of artists seeking to reclaim craftsmanship amid the digital collapse. However, in Ospina’s case, it’s not a nostalgic resistance but rather an expansion of the pictorial language. His paintings neither reject technology nor worship it. They occupy the middle ground—the "kingdom" referenced in the exhibition title: a space between two worlds, where craft and algorithms coexist without negating each other.

The texture of his works, their chromatic density, the overlapping planes, and the care with which each layer is integrated speak to a demanding and reflective technical process. Far from the cliché of the "digital artist," Ospina works with a critical awareness of the medium, and this consciousness is visible in every stroke, every color, every collision of forms.

A Place in Contemporary Latin American Art

Alejandro Ospina’s work occupies a unique place within contemporary Colombian and Latin American art. While he shares concerns with other artists in the region—such as the relationship between image and power or the transmedia circulation of symbols—his aesthetic approach deviates from more common strategies.

Ospina does not engage in direct denunciation or explicit politics. His critique is more subtle: it operates through excess, irony, and collapse. While many contemporary Latin American artists approach history through archives or testimony, Ospina approaches it through the saturation of signs and the digital ruin. He reconstructs, mixes, and reinvents.

This singularity has allowed him to become a reference point for reimagining pictorial possibilities. His work invites us to envision an art that doesn’t need to underscore its identity to be Latin American; an art that thrives in intersections, hybrids, and margins.

La Cometa as a Laboratory

In this exhibition, La Cometa Gallery reaffirms its role as a key platform for the circulation of Colombian art on the international stage. The curatorial approach of The Kingdom in the Middle enhances the artist’s vision, offering an installation that allows the works to breathe while immersing themselves in their own density.

The arrangement of the pieces avoids linearity: the visitor’s journey is fragmented and open, consistent with Ospina’s compositional logic. Each room functions as an autonomous visual ecosystem that, when connected with the others, allows viewers to make free associations and follow their intuition.

In this context, La Cometa is not just an exhibition space but also a laboratory of meaning—a place where contemporary Colombian art can engage diverse audiences and bring its tensions and questions to the forefront.

A Painting for a Networked World

In The Kingdom in the Middle, Alejandro Ospina proposes a vision of art as a field of constant hybridization. His work raises unsettling questions about how we perceive, remember, and connect in a world where images have ceased to be mere reflections and have become interfaces.

In this world, digital saturation is as real as the brushstroke on the canvas, and childhood imagination may serve as a form of resistance against contemporary cynicism. His commitment to mixed media and the interplay between the traditional and the experimental shows that it is still possible to create images that hold our gaze—images that challenge and transform.

The Kingdom in the Middle is an invitation to rethink the place of art in everyday life. An exploration of the chaos we inhabit. A celebration of creation in an age of noise.