ARTIST |
Moises Barrios |
TITLE |
Bodegón de Bananos Repetido 4 Veces |
YEAR |
1997 |
ARTIST’S COUNTRY OF ORIGEN |
Guatemala |
DIMENSIONS |
140 x 110 cm / 55.12 x 43.31 " |
MEDIUM |
Oil on canvas |
Courtesy of the artist
In this composition, Moisés Barrios multiplies a single banana bunch across four quadrants, tracing its gradual passage from vivid green to deep brown. The repetition evokes both the visual logic of the supermarket and the serial strategies of Pop art, where abundance and decay share the same frame. Through the subtle modulation of color—greens and yellows fading into purples and umbers—Barrios captures the life cycle of a commodity, transforming it into a meditation on time, consumption, and obsolescence.
The image recalls Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, where seriality turns the iconic into the impersonal. Yet while Warhol’s star remains eternally frozen, Barrios’s fruit ripens and decomposes, confronting the viewer with the inescapable temporality of organic matter. The repetition becomes both visual and conceptual: a reminder that the banana, emblem of modern consumer culture, is also a perishable body. In its slow browning, desire turns to waste, appetite to aversion.
Barrios’s background in advertising further sharpens this irony. By adopting the language of commercial display—the grid, the repetition, the saturation—he exposes the mechanisms through which tropical abundance was aestheticized and commodified. The work oscillates between seduction and critique, beauty and banality, suggesting that the more one looks, the less remains to be seen. In the end, what lingers is the emptiness that Warhol once described: the void beneath the repetition, where meaning quietly rots away.