Efren Isaza
Bogota, Colombia
12 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
435 21st Street. Suite CU-4 The Governor at Artecity Park. Miami Beach, Florida 33139
Represented by
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Works by Efren Isaza
As an artist Efren works in between photography, painting, drawing, and collage, blurring the boundaries between them, creating a world where the analog and digital coexist in a constant tension. The human body is always present in his artworks, transformed and constructed as a result of mankind´s conflict with their own bodies so he presents the surpass of the natural body in favor of the concept of a built and manipulated beauty. Sometimes those bodies appear transgressed in an explicit and crude manner or as an illusion of perfect or extreme beauty; sometimes they appear as satires to his own or collective imaginary beauty and sometimes as an attempt to exhaust the production of images that have already been produced. Even in his fashion editorials, He transgresses photography as an objective medium, distorting the body’s anatomy and breaking the mimesis of the image. In spite of the anatomical deformation, the body vulnerability, the instability of a sought beauty, and the deconstruction and construction of a new body, the resulting image appears as a perfect illusion simulacrum.
Efren Isaza, one of Colombia’s most influential fashion photographers, initially studied fashion design. He united his interest in fashion with one of his earliest passions: photography. Graceful female figures lounge in fashionable poses. Paper costumes that seem borrowed from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet make the ballerinas look like marionettes.
Their dislocation recalls the puppets Hans Bellmer featured in his surreal photographic experiments. Frida Kahlo’s face with her dark, furrowed eyebrows, peers at the viewer out of different scenes; her hair is knotted artfully on her head.
The allusions evoked in the imaginative creations of Colombian Fashion photographer Isaza are diverse: he cites and alienates an arsenal of styles before melding them into new compositions OF ONE OF A KIND LIMITED EDITION ARTWORK. It might be a certain scene, a poem, a petal of a flower, or the idea of a person that inspires a new work. His passion for breaking the boundaries of traditional fashion photography is palpable in each of Isaza’s unique works. He is less concerned with fashion than the image, the play of contrasts and the magic and the emotions sometimes saturnine, sometimes buoyant, sometimes surreal, and yet always beguiling that the image transports.