Felipe Romero Beltrán — Prix Emerige, Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, 2024
Felipe Romero Beltrán, represented by Hatch Gallery, is the winner of the Emerige Prize—Professional Committee of Art Galleries, which honors the relationship between the artist and his gallery.
Born in 1992 in Bogota, Felipe Romero Beltrán trained in photojournalism before studying photography in Madrid. This dual apprenticeship contributes to the originality of a body of work that intertwines documentary, fiction, testimony, and commitment.
From this pluralistic method combined with in-depth investigations, he invents unique ways of portraying people. The Dialect serie, presented by Hatch at the last edition of the Paris Photo fair1, is emblematic of his total commitment. He documents in it the lives of young Moroccan immigrants awaiting regularization. By focusing on this transient situation and the true suspension of a journey that both precedes and continues it, the artist infuses spontaneity and invention into the testimony, depicting a daily life as absurd as it is full of tensions and human affections. And, by extension, a truth that transcends the initial reason for their encounter as it reveals identities under construction.
Due to his academic background, Felipe Romero Beltrán incorporates a conceptual perspective into his practice that resonates with the history of his medium, offering a sensitive aesthetic where the plasticity of bodies, prominent in his photography, becomes the vector of a secret language that tells us a lot about powerlessness, ordeal, but also resistance. A social and human commitment that questions the choreography of social, mental and legal boundaries. Between staging and observation of objective conditions, the play of life and sometimes survival confers, within the space of photographic breath, all the ambiguity and infinite possibilities of humanity to these beings who populate his images.
Between conceptual creation and documentary photography, Felipe Romero Beltrán thus invents a crossroads that adapts its plastic form to its subjects to imbue its works with an intense dynamic that offers them an unprecedented reflection. This precious polysemy continually shifts expectations and ultimately establishes, within their concrete reality itself, a dimension of fiction and a horizon of fantasies that may not be where one expects.
The Dialect serie is exhibited in Foam, Amsterdam, from January 26th to May 1st.
1 The series was published in 2023 by Loose Joints Publishing, London, Marseille see more
