Carlos Bunga

Over the years, Carlos Bunga has developed a meditative response to architecture that takes the form of sculptural work and site-specific installation. At the National University Museum of Art of Bogotá, a building designed in the modernist tradition by Alberto Estrada, Bunga puts forth an array of propositions that work against and within—and from and toward—context. His installation adds and subtracts content, and it unveils itself to be blatantly rational while at the same time, undisguisedly and somehow unexpectedly, it portrays a sublimation of the contemplative. Never in Bunga’s work had I seen such a rapturous atmosphere, with such little means, as in his intervention in the main interior space of the museum, where two basic elements, a horizontal cardboard strip and a succinct yellow plane, provided an immersive and ecstatic experience. Cardboard is a recurrent material in Bunga’s work. In the previous room it is used to create formidable walls and corridors that radically transform the museum’s architecture, but here it is reduced to its slightest expression, like a plane folded back onto a line, or perhaps onto an idea of a line; such is its silent subtlety.

Bunga’s approach in this project is manifold. In post-Minimalist fashion and through tumultuous action, square concrete shapes have been removed from the floor of the courtyard and stacked nearby. He has also cleared a rectangular surface of grass off the lawn, and an equally reticular ambition is developed in the adjacent space, with cardboard boxes stretching almost endlessly, echoing the structure of the roof. This was a clear example of Bunga’s interest in the precarious transcription of minimal art, much indebted to his signature formalism in opposition to the accomplished yellow paint works that called upon a psychological understanding of space and produced a rather welcome perceptual complexity.