Gustavo Emé's work has a pictorial matrix focused here entirely on computer design. Each of these images invites us to look at them as a kind of cartography: mental territories – variegated or cryptic – that refer us, in different ways, to the city and its complex and glittering social fabric.

This set of signs that he appropriates, however, have been stylized through the filter that the artist imposes on them, with the deliberate use of a today rudimentary design program in the making of his images. The result is a graphic symbiosis of signs, allusions to urban traffic and textual inscriptions in an aesthetic of strictly contemporary elements (from integrated circuits
even video-game screens).

But in this technocratic line, bi-hemispheric references appear that tell us about the relationship between domination and culture: the pendulum movement between assimilation and autonomy -or resistance- in which cultural traditions are debated
prevailing or surviving.

Color saturation and shapes do not allow us to speak of synthesis or simplicity here, even when Emé builds her signs from elementary modules and successive variations in scale, color and position of these in the same image.
A playful and deliberate strategy that in several cases allows an innuendo to (or relationship of similarity with) the design of some pre-Hispanic textiles (particularly Paracas and Nazca).

Remnants that, before the digital eye, update ancestral ideas that refer us to the concentric spheres of the macro and microcosm, to opposite figures and
complementary in specular representation and in the same way, versions of the cyclical catastrophe also often appear in his works, from structures that are dismantled in their minimum components -with even a festive spirit- that make us think of the theory of chaos and the entropy
 

Emilio Tarazona
August, 2006.