*Ronald McDonald, 2019

Installation view

Maquiamelo has made variants of his small, but suggestive installation. In one of them, the head of Scrooge McDuck floats in a safe full of chocolates with the appearance of gold coins. The public is authorized to take them and eat them, an idea he took from Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) by Cuban Félix Gonzáles Torres. In Maquiamelo´s work, however, subtracting ¨coins is equivalent to reducing the exaggerated and foolish accumulation of Scrooge McDuck, the figure that embodies gluttonous and savage capitalism. The sculptor recontextualizes symbols and highlights economic realities. Humor plays in his favor and presents, with an air of farce, something that from another perspective would be a tragedy.

Álvaro Medina

Historian and Art Critic - AICA - Colombia

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Maquiamelo constantly abandons the comfort zone, maintains his critical conviction against contemporary deities, is able to show the dark side of politicians, movie stars, artists or world leaders. In his reduced heads the grandiloquent image is also reduced, defects are focused, weaknesses are highlighted.

Gustavo Ortíz

Director

MAC Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá

Artworks with a high symbolic value, which are related to the painting of Vanitas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, since they allude clearly to vanity, to the emptiness and insignificance of beauty, to wealth or power before the certainty of death.

Eduardo Serrano

Art Critic

Maquiamelo's sculptures break the framework of tradition, being forceful and critical about a society that is definitely governed by material statutes.

Juan David Quintero

Art Critic

From beauties to presidents, and creating reality in fiction, Maquiamelo's work revives the figurative through sculpture, wreaking havoc on social networks, while critics acclaim its daring and diverse series.

Ernesto Muñoz 

Art Critic - AICA - Chile