Pan American Art Projects is pleased to announce Chromophilia, a group exhibition bringing together artists working across painting and sculpture. The exhibition will be on view from September 24 through November 5 at the gallery’s Allapattah location, 1557 NW 28th Street, Miami, FL 33142. It opens to the public with a reception on Thursday, September 24, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm.
The exhibition begins with Adriana Rocha’s (Brazil) portraits, where color replaces drawing as the primary tool of definition. In her Primarias series, color functions as a veil through which the figure gradually dissolves, challenging its conventional role of defining form and depth. Rather than serving the figure, color becomes an autonomous force, charged with emotion, perception, and questions of identity.
From this dissolution of the figure, the exhibition moves toward color as pure visual energy. Getulio Alviani’s (Italy-Venezuela) dynamic spirals abandon narrative in favor of rhythmic compositions built from primary reds and blues, while artists such as Karl Jerry Craig (Jamaica) similarly allow color and form to operate beyond representation. Elsewhere, color takes on a more physical and corporeal presence: in the work of Alejandra Repetto (Argentina) and Carlos Nicanor (Canary Islands), red evokes vitality and the body, while Fernando Canovas and Carolina Sardi (Argentina) transform primary reds and yellows into material and structural elements.
Chromophilia takes its point of departure from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000), which examines Western culture’s historical unease with color—often treating it as decorative, irrational, feminine, or subordinate to the order of line and drawing. Yet Batchelor’s final chapter reverses this diagnosis, celebrating artists who embrace color as a positive and transformative force. It is this turn from fear to affirmation that lies at the heart of Chromophilia.
Today, that gesture acquires new urgency. We live amid an overwhelming saturation of images, information, and identities, increasingly filtered and recombined by algorithms that shape what we see and how we relate. Against this constant mixing, Chromophilia proposes a return to primary color not as nostalgia or simplification, but as an act of conscious choice: a way of reclaiming the elemental and recovering our capacity to decide before systems decide for us.
Across six decades, traditions, and geographies, the artists in this exhibition arrive at a shared impulse: going back to basics not to simplify the world, but to recover its essential shape.
Pan American Art Projects was established in 2001 with the mission to exhibit and promote established and emerging artists from North, Central and South America, providing a context for dialogue between the various regions. We represent a strong roster of contemporary artists of the Americas and hold a collection of important works from Cuba, Argentina, the U.S. and the Caribbean. Our programming reflects these complementary arenas providing a comprehensive historical context for contemporary tendencies in the visual arts from these regions.
The gallery was born from the personal collection of our owner, Robert Borlenghi, who as a founding member of MOCA Los Angeles made his first trip to Haiti in 1990 and found many great artists that were relatively unknown to collectors in the U.S. He made it his mission to collect and exhibit underrepresented artists from Haiti, Jamaica and later Cuba. This mission then transferred to our gallery when we opened in Dallas in 2001, when we began adding actively represented artists from North and South America.
