This book collects very special moments in the work of Ana Mercedes Hoyos, the Colombian painter who holds a very prominent place in contemporary Latin American art. The journey through its pages allows one to appreciate the admirable reinterpretation of still life and dead nature that the artist has made with enormous creativity, based on the colorful platters of fresh fruit that the black vendors of Palenque offer to tourists on the beaches of Cartagena, as well as other aspects of her delightful pictorial incursion into one of the most interesting cultures of Colombia. The characters of San Basilio de Palenque, their customs, their hobbies, their traditions, have taken over Ana Mercedes Hoyos's canvases in a siege that she assumes from a perspective both intellectual and affective. Because the work of Ana Mercedes HoyosAs noted by the author of the text accompanying this book, art critic Eduardo Serrano, “Ana Mercedes Hoyos's painting combines cultural and social reasoning with a voluptuous and penetrating gaze and great technical mastery. Nominally, the first paintings of her later stages could be classified as still lifes, since they usually depict containers with splendid tropical fruits. But, unlike traditional still lifes, her paintings not only reveal the mediation of photography and are outdoors, but also constitute a document about the life, values, and aesthetic preferences of an ethnic group that has made invaluable contributions to the national culture and has only sporadically (Wiedemann) received the attention of artists.