Arturo Kameya’s work inhabits the spectral space between object, image, and narrative, using sculptural assemblage and painted reliefs to evoke the remnants of lived experience, cultural memory, and political rupture, in his installations—such as the fragmented figure slumped across a chair or the hollowed-out jacket suspended on a wall—Kameya creates hybrid forms that oscillate between painting and sculpture, where absence becomes the main protagonist, the worn-out textures, faded hues, and carefully staged decay suggest objects that once served a purpose, now rendered inert yet still hauntingly present, this strategy of material storytelling is central to his practice, which draws from domestic environments, vernacular materials, and Andean visual culture to reflect on Peruvian socio-political conditions, postcolonial exhaustion, and historical erasure, the anthropomorphic chair installation, for instance, evokes both a body and its disappearance, while the tattered windbreaker—painted with a melancholic seascape—becomes a memorial surface, inscribed with traces of migration, labor, or loss, these objects are not merely metaphors but residues of systemic collapse, quietly monumental in their quiet defiance, as if caught between endurance and disappearance, Kameya’s practice resists spectacle, instead constructing a language of minor gestures and silent crises, where clothing, furniture, and architecture become carriers of collective grief and deferred dreams, ultimately, his sculptural paintings operate as surfaces of interruption, unsettling the viewer with their uncanny tactility and the persistent question of who or what has been erased.
Arturo Kameya, postcolonial memory, sculptural painting, absence, Peruvian art, domestic politics, material storytelling, hybrid forms, spectral objects, Latin American contemporary art
