This article is important because it is one of the first to explain how Danilo Dueñas (b. 1956) works, going beyond a simple description of the work itself and the fact that the Colombian artist is prone to include references to art history in his work, as pointed out in earlier essays. The critic José Hernán Aguilar (b. 1952) claims that Dueñas’ work inverts the Duchamp idea of readymade by giving meaning to the objects that he finds and then reconstructing rather than assembling them. Hernán Aguilar’s dissertation on the meaning of readymade is important, because in his opinion, its roots are really in painting, not sculpture. Dueñas’ works thus affirm their status as works of art by means of a reflection that suffuses his objets trouvés with meaning. According to the critic, Dueñas creates links from his work to a number of painting practices that include found objects in order to somehow reinterpret or “adulterate” either works from art history or the objects themselves. This is why Dueñas’ works, though basically paintings, can be created with any found object. Based on the construction of each painting, Aguilar provides a taxonomical guide to the exhibition, dividing the works into six groups, as follows: (1) Relief (usually in wood) with a little paint; (2) Constructions with artificial light; (3) Surfaces decorated with a photograph; (4) Found surfaces that have been painted in an Abstract Expressionist style; (5) Paintings on canvas but with very little paint, executed in a Color Field style; (6) Everything else, which could mean a piece of sparsely painted wooden flooring or a partially destroyed foam chair seat with minimal textual addition.
Though Dueñas’ paintings can be conceptually opaque, Aguilar provides a key to unlocking their meaning: the title. The correlation between title and painting is important, because while not completely explaining the paintings, the titles help to understand the works so that they are not quite “so abstract.”
