Conchetumare. Ciento cincuenta millones de años 2018

Francis Naranjo made this artwork called "Conchetumare. Ciento cincuenta millones de años," and from the title I can already tell, this dude's thinking big, like, geologic time big. It's a photograph of what looks like a desert landscape, all those sandy, earthy tones, contrasted with a bright, almost aggressively blue sky. But then, smack dab in the middle, there's this stark black shape, like a flag or a weird, angular shadow. It's a bold move. The flatness of that black shape against the textured, almost tactile quality of the landscape, that's what grabs me. You can almost feel the grit of the sand, the heat radiating off the rocks. Then you see this black thing, and it's like a glitch, something alien, something that doesn't quite belong. It's like a formal intervention, like something Robert Irwin or someone might do. It disrupts the sense of space, of depth. It throws everything off, in a good way. Anyway, I think this piece is worth pondering, because it's asking us to think about our place in time, in the world, and how sometimes, the things we create can feel so small, so insignificant against the vastness of it all.