Erick Beltrán is a conceptual artist whose work investigates human communication. His multilayered projects and installations attempt to decipher contemporary visual culture by analyzing how structural systems and notions of categorization shape the ways in which people assign value to images and objects, as well as to one another.

Archive, museum, and library serve as conceptual models for Beltrán – these are institutions devoted to collecting, ordering, and classifying items that become instilled with cultural significance. In Enciclopedia (2005), for example, he created his own visual encyclopedia using random imagery culled from mass media publications. He compiled, reproduced, and systematized the images, and in the process questioned the very concepts of “ordering” and “systems,” which rendered these so-called organizing principles arbitrary and useless.

The randomness of signs and symbols is particularly apparent in Beltrán’s most recent project, Expanded Diagram (2007). In this installation, he covered an entire room with charts, diagrams, and drawings that attempt to visually trace the evolution of an idea into a larger theoretical debate. Interested in notions of collecting, mapping, translation, and syntax, Beltrán’s complex installations interrogate notions of fact and fiction, and the construction of cultural narratives, by examining the systems that we use to collect, distribute, and circulate images.

- Guillermo Samtamarina