RED, YELLOW, BLU
Samuel Urrutia
March, 2026
Samuel Urrutia
March, 2026
2In a moment marked by acceleration, saturation, and persistent noise, Yellow, Red, Blu offers a deliberate suspension. Organized around the primary colors– among the first systems through which we learn to see and name the world– the exhibition returns to a rudimentary visual grammar, offering a shared ground where perception slows and meaning is not immediately fixed. Bringing together three interconnected bodies of work, Lupa en Rojo, Sobre Mareas, and egeo blu, Bogotá-based photographer and architect Samuel Urrutia proposes color not as symbolism but as structure: a means of re-entering the world through water, light, and sustained looking. The exhibition unfolds as a chromatic refuge, where perception is slowed and the landscape is no longer consumed, but inhabited. Across the trilogy, water and its proxies become both subject and method– an ever-shifting plane that returns the viewer to attentiveness and doubt rather than confirmation.
Sobre Mareas establishes the project’s tide-like logic through reflections and shadows that “dance,” a surface eternally changing and paradoxically constant. Urrutia’s images gather the everyday– edifices, moments, incidental encounters with light– from opposing latitudes and solar positions. In doing so, he re-weights the hierarchy of landscape. What is usually peripheral becomes decisive. What is fleeting becomes a site where the world is reorganized through the oscillation of shadow and reflection, under the muted conditions of a northern harbor in winter light.
From this premise, Lupa en Rojo advances the question of what a contemporary landscape can be by constructing “non-places” that nevertheless function as portraits of place. Framing a section of Copenhagen’s Frederiksholms Kanal as a maritime landscape seen through the ordinary, the work allows the quotidian not merely to interrupt the scene, but to dominate and reconstitute it. Material is integral to the concept. Through photographic sublimation on aluminum, surface and subject converge. The reflective support is not neutral; it completes the work’s internal logic, turning the image into both a literal and conceptual mirror in which a fragment of the canal becomes a broader field of inquiry and observation.
If red sharpens the lens and yellow registers the oscillation of time and light, egeo blu carries the trilogy to a threshold where photography becomes explicitly pictorial. Rooted in the memory of a blue encountered at the meeting of land and sea, the series unfolds as a sustained study of chromatic transition. Urrutia treats the camera as a plastic instrument, painting with exposure, movement, and chromatic temperature until the image seems to surface from within light itself. Light functions as pigment, color as atmosphere, and the movement of water as gesture, aligning the work with Turner’s understanding of painting as a material and perceptual process rather than a descriptive one. Water, sky, and horizon persist only as traces– cues for orientation– while color accumulates into a sensory field shaped by tides, skies, and coastal thresholds rather than by place as depiction.
Taken together, the three series propose an expanded landscape tradition that moves between documentation and construction, between the transient and the made-permanent, between medium and material. Yellow, Red, Blu insists on duration—on a return to first principles of seeing, where color, light, and water operate as organizing forces rather than symbols. The trilogy invites the viewer to follow water’s intelligence, not to decode an image, but to inhabit it, where color becomes matter and the landscape remains an open question.
Yellow, Red, Blu is presented as a virtual exhibition on the ALA Projects platform and will be on view from January 20 through March 2026.
Text by Sofia Fabiancic-Zühr
Sobre Mareas establishes the project’s tide-like logic through reflections and shadows that “dance,” a surface eternally changing and paradoxically constant. Urrutia’s images gather the everyday– edifices, moments, incidental encounters with light– from opposing latitudes and solar positions. In doing so, he re-weights the hierarchy of landscape. What is usually peripheral becomes decisive. What is fleeting becomes a site where the world is reorganized through the oscillation of shadow and reflection, under the muted conditions of a northern harbor in winter light.
From this premise, Lupa en Rojo advances the question of what a contemporary landscape can be by constructing “non-places” that nevertheless function as portraits of place. Framing a section of Copenhagen’s Frederiksholms Kanal as a maritime landscape seen through the ordinary, the work allows the quotidian not merely to interrupt the scene, but to dominate and reconstitute it. Material is integral to the concept. Through photographic sublimation on aluminum, surface and subject converge. The reflective support is not neutral; it completes the work’s internal logic, turning the image into both a literal and conceptual mirror in which a fragment of the canal becomes a broader field of inquiry and observation.
If red sharpens the lens and yellow registers the oscillation of time and light, egeo blu carries the trilogy to a threshold where photography becomes explicitly pictorial. Rooted in the memory of a blue encountered at the meeting of land and sea, the series unfolds as a sustained study of chromatic transition. Urrutia treats the camera as a plastic instrument, painting with exposure, movement, and chromatic temperature until the image seems to surface from within light itself. Light functions as pigment, color as atmosphere, and the movement of water as gesture, aligning the work with Turner’s understanding of painting as a material and perceptual process rather than a descriptive one. Water, sky, and horizon persist only as traces– cues for orientation– while color accumulates into a sensory field shaped by tides, skies, and coastal thresholds rather than by place as depiction.
Taken together, the three series propose an expanded landscape tradition that moves between documentation and construction, between the transient and the made-permanent, between medium and material. Yellow, Red, Blu insists on duration—on a return to first principles of seeing, where color, light, and water operate as organizing forces rather than symbols. The trilogy invites the viewer to follow water’s intelligence, not to decode an image, but to inhabit it, where color becomes matter and the landscape remains an open question.
Yellow, Red, Blu is presented as a virtual exhibition on the ALA Projects platform and will be on view from January 20 through March 2026.
Text by Sofia Fabiancic-Zühr