WHAT REMAINS, WHAT DISAPPEARS
Tracing the visible, sensing the absent
Six Colombian artists who question how we perceive memory, time, and image
For the Dallas Art Fair 2026, Beatriz Esguerra Art presents What Remains, What Disappears, a selection of six Colombian artists whose practices explore memory, time, and image. The presentation centers on works that stimulate the mind, open the imagination, and reveal what endures or slowly dissolves.
At the heart of the booth are three photographers who use the medium to examine the tensions between presence and absence.
Mario Arroyave presents works from his Timeline series alongside landscapes charged with spiritual intensity, captured during his journeys “to the end of the world.” Both bodies of work investigate how moments accumulate, fragment, or fade away, tracing the fragile boundary between reality and invention.
Jairo Llano records with his camera the instant when paper breaks into space and unfolds into almost architectural volumes. These ephemeral structures exist only long enough to be photographed, and his images function simultaneously as presence and disappearance, offering a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the quiet beauty of what vanishes.
Max Steven Grossman continues his exploration of cultural organization and visual identity through fictional photographic spaces. His constructed libraries—composed of thousands of book covers and spines—evoke the idea of an ideal library that does not exist, while also reflecting on how knowledge, memory, and desire are shaped by what we choose to preserve and what we allow to disappear.
Complementing these photographic approaches, three Colombian artists deepen the exhibition’s reflective atmosphere.
Pablo Arrázola (drawing) depicts children transformed into superheroes—figures that embody the desire to reshape reality through imagination and action. His drawings explore childhood as a space of freedom and invention, where play becomes a way of testing limits and imagining other possible worlds. Behind their apparent lightness, these works reflect on vulnerability, courage, and the human impulse to transform one’s surroundings.
Camila Echavarría (painting) creates quiet landscapes of trees, where observation turns into reflection. The trunks shift—almost imperceptibly—into bar codes, as if nature were being catalogued, priced, or translated into data. Within these coded patterns, proportions and numerical echoes evoke the Fibonacci sequence, a model of harmony often associated with nature’s ideal order. Her paintings move between the living and the calculated, asking how beauty is perceived, quantified, and remembered.
Pedro Ruiz (painting) addresses landscape and territory as spaces shaped by social and political forces. Nature—understood as a power we cannot control but must learn to live in harmony with—runs through his work, alongside themes of displacement, extraction, and the tensions between rural and urban life. His images bring together poetic intensity and symbolic depth, translating complex histories into visual narratives that speak both to collective memory and lived experience.
Through different media, What Remains, What Disappears brings together a group of artists whose disciplined and reflective practices invite thoughtful observation. The booth invites a quiet, contemplative experience, encouraging viewers to consider not only what is visible, but also what is implied: what remains, and what inevitably fades.
“At Beatriz Esguerra Art, we promote Colombian artists whose work combines intelligence, imagination, poetry, and aesthetic rigor. What Remains, What Disappears reflects our commitment to an art that invites thoughtful observation: an art that captivates quietly, opens spiritual and mental spaces, and invites viewers to discover meanings beyond what is visible.”
— Beatriz Esguerra, Director, Beatriz Esguerra Art
