El sueño de Panamá

The Museo Canal Interoceánico de Panamá is an exhibition space dedicated to a permanent collection that tells the story of Panama through 1,350 artifacts, from the pre-Columbian era to the present day. “This heritage,” reads the museum’s website, “faithfully bears witness to our importance as a transisthmian route, the studies, explorations, and the entire arduous process of building the Canal.” In 2012, the Museum gave birth to an exhibition that allowed to discover something usually not known, and that is that the Parisian Paul Gauguin worked as a digger in the Canal (for the first project built by the French engineers, then left unfinished).  

In 1887, the artist in fact who at the time was not really appreciated by the public or by critics, had left France and had headed to Taboga, a small island in the Gulf of Panama: "I'm going to Panama to live as a savage - he told his relatives and friends - I know of a small island in the Pacific that is just off Panama. It is almost uninhabited, free, and fertile. I am going to take my brushes and paint with me and will head there to become stronger ".

When he arrived in Panama, he didn't have a penny to his name. So, for more than a month he worked as a digger for the Canal works. That period greatly influenced his work, which exalted the Tropics. The 2012 exhibition was called “El sueño de Panamá”. It “rebuilt” that period in a setting with oil paintings, engravings, documents and images from museums and worldwide collections.