Selva color del tiempo – Mariane Ibrahim

Mariane Ibrahim is proud to present Selva color del tiempo, José Gamarra’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. The exhibition takes its title from the text Édouard Glissant wrote for Gamarra’s 1985 exhibition at Galerie Albert Loeb in Paris. A central figure in Caribbean thought and the Poetics of Relation, Glissant engaged with the artist’s work for decades as a writer, collector, and friend. In the essay that lends the exhibition its title, Glissant identifies in Gamarra’s painting a conception of the forest that exceeds the conventions of landscape. The forest emerges as a territory in which history remains inscribed and from which the experience of the Americas can be understood. Far from representing the Amazon as a remote or untouched space, Gamarra transforms it into an archive where conquest, colonization, the exploitation of natural resources, and their persistence in the present converge. Presented for the first time in Mexico, these works propose a continental reading in which the forest ceases to belong to any single country and becomes a place from which the shared history of the Americas can be read. 

The exhibition brings together works made between 1966 and 2026, from the ink drawings that accompanied the transformation of Gamarra’s pictorial language to Fleuve de sang (2026). Rather than a retrospective, the exhibition traces a sustained investigation across six decades, during which landscape becomes the ground for a reflection on the history of the continent.