Beyond Form
Camila Barreto
A dialogue between the works of Camila Barreto and Zaha Hadid’s ‘Elastika’ at The Moore Building, Miami.
Since 2005, The Moore’s atrium has housed ‘Elastika’, the permanent sculptural installation conceived by Zaha Hadid — a three-dimensional manifesto that transforms the perception of space through a fluid, enveloping structure.
Barreto’s selected works activate that space through two-dimensional pictorial tensions that prioritize continuity, flow, and the expansion of form. Through distinct languages, painter and architect converge to construct fields of force and tension — an encounter among painting, architecture, and spatial experience.
Will-o’-the-wisp
The will-o’-the-wisp names the fleeting flames — blue and green — that hover over water in swamps and graveyards, a light that carves a path through the dark. The series gathers six paintings, each structured around a single decisive line.
That emphasis on the horizon line alludes to the wound, the break, the displacement. Here the will-o’-the-wisp is the light that emerges from the wound — a metaphor for a moment of healing after rupture, where pain transforms and becomes light.
Negentropic Machines
“We need to talk about corbels to understand negentropic machines.” The corbel — the element that bears the weight of beams and structures — becomes the metaphor through which Barreto speaks of weight: the weight carried as a woman. Her supports are not suspended but static, frozen in a state of agitation.
Negentropy is the opposite of entropy: a system’s ability to generate order and resist collapse. It does not eliminate chaos but counteracts it, reorganizing energy to sustain itself. Life itself is a negentropic act — a fragile structure that constantly reorganizes to prevent its own disintegration.
Camila Barreto
- Bogotá, 1982 — lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia
Barreto’s practice spans painting and installation. Her language is abstraction, through which she translates memory, lived experience, and the passage between the ephemeral and the permanent into pictorial gestures that connect her inner world with the outer one.
Femininity, motherhood, and self-reliance surface as recurring themes; each series reinterprets patterns and palettes until it completes its own cycle — a vital gesture that lets her breathe the air of a new beginning.
- Salón Nacional de Artistas, Cartagena (2010)
- Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Bogotá (2009)
- ARTBO International Art Fair, Bogotá — three editions (2022–2024)
- Material Art Fair, Mexico City (2025) · PINTA PARC, Lima (2024)
- Zona Maco, Mexico City (2026) — with Galería Elvira Moreno
- Solo shows: “LOGOS” (GEM, 2025) · “Obsesión” (Casa Hoffmann, 2024)
Galería Elvira Moreno
A Bogotá gallery devoted to modern and contemporary Latin American art, and a space for research, experimentation, and progressive thought. It champions artists whose work has entered major international collections — among them the Tate, the Reina Sofía, and the Centre Pompidou — and brings Camila Barreto’s practice into dialogue with Front Row’s program at The Moore.