Artist: Jhonatan Pulido

Alma Pearl presents Reparación, Jhonatan Pulido’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation includes new paintings as well as a site-specific intervention. Building on the themes explored in his previous work, Pulido here addresses notions of healing, restoration, and remembrance in relation to conflict and wartime violence.

Reparación, also the title of one of the works in the exhibition, translates as "repair" or "reparation." Stitched together into separate sections of canvas, this piece is Pulido's largest painting to date. The artist here reimagines the rural vernacular architecture of his native Colombia, incorporating the style of DIY advertisements commonly found on local walls. The stitching evokes a tradition of gendered labour and carries powerful metaphorical implications. In the large painting Sobandero, which translates as “healer” and often associated with ancestral knowledge, Pulido lists ailments that can be cured—ranging from broken bones to flu-like symptoms. Similarly, diamond-shaped symbols, a prominent motif in Pulido’s work, were traditionally painted to invoke rain, good fortune, and bountiful harvests, echoing indigenous and shamanistic beliefs. These symbols continue to be painted on houses today, just as their ancestors once painted them on rock faces.

Pulido’s site-specific intervention mirrors the walls of his native region, becoming a metaphor for a space, which is both political and deeply personal and reflects the complex weave of human existence. Layers of paint are applied to conceal childhood memories of tags and graffiti here re-worked through acts of sanding and scraping.

Jhonatan Pulido’s painting practice is centred on expressive mark making that draws on an explosive colour palette. He works through a continual application of material that produces bold fields of colour and form that interact and overlap to explore the vibrancy of painting today alongside the evocation of memory and reparation of trauma lodged in the past.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by writer and curator Tom Morton. Download the full text here.