Carlos Alfonso

Carlos Alfonso’s Fruits, Hanging Organs (2021) reimagines the still life as a cosmology of nourishment, ecology, and interdependence. Painted in oil and acrylic on wood, the composition gathers an array of tropical fruits—papaya, cacao, guava, mango, and banana—against a serene blue background, arranged with the precision of both a botanist and a storyteller. Each fruit, rendered with luminous care, functions as a living archive of Colombia’s Cundinamarca region, where agriculture, culinary tradition, and environment are intricately entwined. The image forms a visual inventory of abundance, yet its title hints at fragility: these “hanging organs” sustain not just the human body, but the larger body of the ecosystem itself.

Beneath the cluster, a tree with anatomical fruit—a heart here, a lung there—anchors the painting’s conceptual core. On one side, a monkey’s face peers from the roots; on the other, a human’s, signaling a continuum between species and the shared vulnerability that unites them. The text inscribed along the bottom, written in the style of pre-Hispanic codices and votive offerings, lists the medicinal, spiritual, and emotional virtues of each fruit. This litany of uses and cures transforms the painting into a contemporary herbal compendium, where empirical knowledge and ancestral wisdom coexist. Alfonso’s meticulous transcription of this knowledge—half scientific, half ritual—bridges the divide between the natural and the sacred.

Within this taxonomy of the edible, the banana occupies a modest yet crucial position. Associated here with rest, muscle relaxation, and digestion, it becomes a symbol of balance amid excess—a fruit that mediates between the sensual and the essential. Through its repetition across Alfonso’s Bodegones series, the banana embodies the persistence of tropical imaginaries within both local and global economies. Fruits, Hanging Organs thus offers more than an inventory of nature’s gifts; it is a meditation on reciprocity, reminding us that consumption and care, like fruit and body, are inseparably intertwined.