For some time now, the work of Gustavo Emé has opted for a kaleidoscopic view of the contents of cities. Why did he do it? Perhaps because in that careful formula, which equally divides and multiplies, the city of Emé is remade from a scheme that is none other than a desired order, for all the elements that seem to float carelessly in real life. There the combis vs. the mp3 players that silently resonate in their interiors, or the way in which laptops are cluttered and mass high-tech vs. the colonial balcony, recall in a graphic way high and low, new and old culture, in a scheme of oppositions that equates the pre-Hispanic textile referent with the pictorial one, the same as with the pixel and the wallpaper –a posture that surprisingly has not yet it ceases to be sharp in the realm of local representation.

As a historical tour of the city and the Peruvian national, Emé does not manage to avoid social commentary, he affirms it but superimposes a map of his own sensibility and his aesthetic choices. They comfortably surf several plastic mediums, respecting and emphasizing the respective spaces of each one, without failing to make that confrontation screech with a certain irony. An option in which the urban plans –which here all owe to the thought prior to the perspective- are a provocative graphic synthesis and without any complex for affirming through it a certain unavoidable costumbrismo, although modular and distantly seen.
A specular gaze that either straightens or flips, like a playing card, the deck of a city that overflows with its own games and the choppy tide of its unstoppable heterogeneity .

Rodrigo Quijano

* The author plays with the equivalent of the artist's last name: the letter "M", referring to "Shit" (Ciudad de eMé: shit city).