Henry Price, an English painter in the service of the Chorographic Commission, a scientific expedition touring Colombia in 1850, is following the trail of a mysterious and skilled local artist whose identity is scarcely known or is only rumored in popular circles. What begins as a mere professional interest – one artist fascinated by another – ends up becoming an obsession, a philosophical adventure and a path of learning for the foreign painter, who, in the course of the expedition, will end up immersed in the political maelstrom of the young republic. This is the premise that sets in motion Transparent Pilgrim, an imposing and hypnotic novel in which we see all the ghosts of the contemporary world parade, projected against the backdrop of the 19th century: the geopolitics of commodities, racism as a tactic of global domination, colonial representations of the tropics, the destruction of nature at the hands of an irrational capitalism, but also utopias and the imagination of possible futures for the human species.
