Madrid,
In 2023, the young Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán was the winner of the Kbr Photo Award contest, convened by the Mapfre Foundation to offer opportunities and visibility to the novel creators in that discipline. Born in Bogotá and trained in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem and Madrid – last year, he was a doctorate in information sciences in the Complutense with a thesis on the documentary image – this author has been placing his projects halfway between that documentary genre (he deals with the record of the everyday, attends to defined historical and geographical realities) and the purely creative Works cover a wide field of study related to visuality as a whole.
Speaking of geographies, Romero Beltrán has focused on those who suffer or are subject to tensions and conflicts: one of his first works was Magdalenadedicated to the river of his country that, from the sixties until a decade ago, was the scene of fighting between the FARC and the army and tomb of many of its dead; Then they arrived Dialect/dialecton the legal limbo in which there are those who go through the Strait of Gibraltar, or the audiovisual pieces Recital (2020), Instruction/Instruction (2022) and This is your law/this is your lawwhich earned him international recognition: last year he presented at the Amsterdam Foam.
The proposal with which Romero took the Kbr Photo Award was Bravoand again it took us to a border ground, and therefore of dispute: the river that separates the United States and Mexico. He runs along 3,000 kilometers, but the photographer chose to locate his investigation in his bank near Monterrey, where thousands of people try to cross it in their migrations, a habit that has a fundamental weight in the ways of life and the identity of those who reside in the city. This constitutes the last stage of more than hard displays from Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala; And the surroundings of Monterrey, a militarized zone: what happens before wading the river interests the artist more than his channel itself, secondary actor. In Romero’s words, the Bravo River does not order its project, but limits it: It is an exhaustion exercise until you reach the river, without the possibility of crossing it. In that sense, the river exists as its visual denial, focusing interest on what precedes: the entrance to the United States.
There are fifty -two images that make up this essay, between architectures -in which textures, colors and traces of the passage of migrants -people and landscapes are underlined, structured in the sample that the MAPFRE Foundation now provides in Madrid in Madrid closures, bodies and Gaps.
In the first set, Romero detects borders inside the houses that refer to the external ones, from perspectives close to the conceptual: he finds them in the corners or derived from the location of the furniture, and the occasional presence of stones reinforces their sense of limit. Also outside: on the outer edges of the houses, in the small roads that die in the river.
As for the series of bodiesthese allude to their efforts and resistance during the experience of migrants: in them tiredness and hope are also embodied, the Limes United States. The Gaps They point to architectures and infrastructure, some unfinished, from that land halfway between two.
These works are completed with an audiovisual piece, The crossingwhose realization is prior to the photos and that expands the presence of the river towards more extensive issues than the border: a Protestant baptism, a fishing contest, interviews on linguistic issues, the testimony of a swimmer who has no intention of crossing the brave, and that of the seller of the wet clothes of the migrants, which does for his own survival. Apart from its political role, the river is also a river, a half of life and recreation in a geographical area that is a transition space, with an internal and proper logic outside the epic and alternative to its presence in cinema and literature.
This exhibition, curated by Victoria del Val, coincides in the rooms of the Mapfre Foundation in Recoletos with the largest monographic of José Guerrero, who photographs nature, architectures, archeologies and the passage of time on them from a lyrical approach. Also with the review of the main photographic proposal of Nicholas Nixon: the one dedicated to the Brown sisters.
Felipe Romero Beltrán. “Bravo”
Mapfre Foundation
Recoletos Paseo, 23
Madrid
From June 5 to August 24, 2025
