By Álvaro de Benito Fernández

The double problem that arose from the acquisition in the 1980s of several hippos in one of the many eccentricities of the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar is the starting point of a fable that, between the tragic and the comic, Camilo Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia, 1975) has managed to weave with a very successful graphic and conceptual narrative. With Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood, the viewer faces this surreal story from its beginnings to the present by the hand of a figurativeness that puts aside the academic and the technical for the sake of greater aesthetic and relational concordance with that of the madness that the story itself conveys.

If the fact itself may seem dreamlike, the truth is that the problem of the so-called "drug hippos" has become a chaos of the first order. What stands out as interesting in this story is the sublimation of the intricacies and the satire with which Restrepo flows over the story. Starting from a mural of multiple papers in which the general history of the hippopotamus as an animal is covered, the Colombian accesses the use of pop figures and characters, as well as an abundant current iconography to identify new elements in his conceptual research where the background, the invisible, takes on special prominence.

From this great seminal framework, which in itself contains elements that advocate for an endless number of readings that the visitor must recognize, new stories have germinated, derivatives that take on a life of their own to delve more deeply into each of those points that the artist considers essential to understand the grotesque. The series of drawings with semantic visual games lead us to the appropriation of imagery and words in the collective feeling, making them familiar and even resorting to that factor of almost childish nostalgia with which to see, from the point of view of innocence, tragedy, thus encouraging that tug-of-war in the tragicomic.

The ecological problem also has a place. Recently, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca signed the decree for the eradication of Pablo Escobar's hippos, more than 250 in its last census, and which has become a headache. Invasive species, the second cause of eradication of endemic fauna in the world, have in these artiodactyls a new angle for Restrepo. How to eliminate them? With the strange idea of ​​blowing up the stranded whales in mind, the artist claims the absurd as a solution in a succinct, short, but tremendously visual and explanatory video art piece, which is complemented by the usual visual of the video game, counting and subtracting lives, as if it were a marker to solve the problem.

Beyond how explicit some of Restrepo's representations may be, his proposal has a full impact due to its apparent narrative simplicity, supported by the management of the numerous techniques he deploys and which come to surprise due to the discovery of new stories that, while being real, start from the eccentric, that same concept that allows this fable to play with all our senses.