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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
José Pelletier
Overpopulation 1998
acrylic on canvas 75 x 60.2 cm

José Pelletier was born in 1976 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where he studied at the National School of Fine Arts. He teaches art in San Cristóbal, near the capital. In the lower part of the painting buildings are shown individually, but further up they gradually metamorphose into tightly packed cellular compartments, into which bodies are squeezed. The artist comments: ‘Population growth affects developed countries and developing countries differently. In the former, the population is distributed vertically in tower blocks. For the less developed countries, where there is an alarmingly high population growth, population expansion is horizontal and ever more chaotic. I believe that the growth of a country does not depend on the number of inhabitants but on the way in which they organise themselves’.