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Finca means farm, but as painter Adam de Boer discovered on the trip that inspired his new show at Flashpoint, everything in Colombia has an alternate meaning. The finca may be a working farm, but the middle class families who go there are hardly roughing it – instead, they're more like rustic retreats where families can get a taste of agrarian life without getting their hands too dirty. Pastoral scenes of leisure make up much of de Boer's show, taken from his trip to a colleague's family finca in Villeta Cundinamarca, Colombia, last December. The Ospina family lounges in hammocks and goes for horseback rides, defying American stereotypes of Colombia as a violent country. The private security shacks that de Boer saw everywhere are mostly ornamental these days: Left over from a more dangerous era, most of them are dilapidated, as depicted in "Guard Booth," but de Boer says that the Colombians he encountered would never tear them down out of a residual pride for their country's notoriously dangerous history. Religion in Colombia was also oddly artificial to de Boer, who was raised Catholic. Crucifixes and religious iconography are a recurring theme in the show, but they deviate from traditional depictions. de Boer paints an important religious icon in Colombia in "Fallen Christ" because he found it to be a strange representation of Jesus, who is shown without a cross, taking him out of context from the 12 stations. And de Boer said that when he visited the icon, the chapel was playing secular Christmas songs and was garishly decorated. If one painting best encompasses de Boer's entire cultural experience in Colombia, it might be "Virgin and Child Under a Fluorescent Light": Where one person sees religious devotion, another might see only artifice. de Boer lets us decide. – Maura Judkis

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