Mateo Gómez Pinto

In Trials for a Subtractive Colour Banana Republic Flag (CYMK), Colombian artist Mateo Gómez Pinto revisits the historical and symbolic weight of the term banana republic through the language of printing itself. The work emerges from the artist’s attempt to design a “definitive” flag for a fictional nation whose borders are defined not by geography, but by economic dependence. Using the four primary colors of subtractive printing—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—Gómez Pinto layers images of banana carriers over a digitally fragmented chromatic field, where colors blend, fade, and bleed into one another.

This visual instability becomes a metaphor for the political and economic fragility of the so-called banana republics: nations whose sovereignty has been diluted by the extractive logic of the enclave economy. The figures of workers march across the flag like spectral imprints—reproduced, erased, and reprinted—echoing the cycles of exploitation and invisibility that have historically defined the region’s labor dynamics. Even as the Colombian flag remains faintly recognizable, it dissolves into a palette that could belong anywhere and to no one, suggesting a transnational identity shaped by global capital rather than national cohesion.

By treating printing not only as a medium but as a critical framework, Gómez Pinto transforms process into politics. The CMYK code—normally invisible, hidden in the mechanics of image reproduction—becomes the conceptual ground of the piece, symbolizing how modern economies standardize, replicate, and flatten distinct histories. Trials for a Subtractive Colour Banana Republic Flag thus proposes a flag for an imagined nation of extraction—one printed into being through the overlapping residues of labor, color, and colonial legacy.