While in Cusco, Peru lately we found a super cool boutique hotel/ art bar/ restaurant called Fallen Angel. One of the highlights of the Peru trip, the experience there really captured my imagination. If you dropped this place 100% as it is into San Francisco it would thrive. The tables you eat off were made of a glass top over an old iron bathtub which was a live goldfish tank. The menu had other things, but the flagship series of items was all steak with different seasoning or sauce. I hope to go back someday.
It was equal parts art gallery, hotel and restaurant/ bar. The art featured modern Peruvian artists, one of the major installments was from Richard Peralta. He has a series of mixed media paintings called Inmaculada Deception you can check out on his website here. This series was inspired by the atrocities of the Shining Path.
The Shining Path was/is an extreme Maoist/ Leftist group in Peru. They killed and terrorized particularly around the year 2000, but as recently as one year ago they have been re-organizing around illegal cocaine trade to fund their guerrilla activities. They had a practice of abducting children and turning them into warriors. Really terrorizing poor villagers and heinous stuff. This is much of the content in Richard Peralta's series I very much found equal parts intriguing, atrocious, beautiful and stimulating.
The image above is a piece I bought from the gallery, below are a few others I found interesting also. A theme was children with gas masks, spears, automatic weapons, angel wings, and Shining Path warriors. A link to his website is above if you want to see more.
