Gustavo Zalamea

Gustavo Zalamea is an experienced art profesor of Colombia´s National University in Bogota – one of the most reknowned for producing talented artists in the country. His latest exhibition presents a selection of the last 10 years of his work.

In relation to his most recent work the artist himself admits that there are many things unfinished and those that are finished may leave a doubt in the mind of the audience. “The pictures that are finished do not seem to be finished, as the painting comes from the back such that the material, which at times is raw canvas, is a filter and comes forward. This creates a sensation of weakness or lightness and that interests me, “says the teacher and former director of the School of Fine Arts at the National University.

Many of these paintings relate to political issues – Zalamea´s leitmotif. But what is new to his work is his writing. In this exhibition, which is on display at the Museum of Visual Arts at the University Jorge Tadeo Lozano until late June, his investigative texts are presented along with the rest of his work – indeed as part of it in relation to this exhibition.

Investigative Scribbles

These texts, scribbles, notes and concept maps are a new form of art that were formerly part of the essential process of research and analysis. But this time the artist integrates them into his works, including them in his exhibition space along with the graphic content.

In this selection curated by Ana Maria Escallon, there are videos, paintings and some installations and sculptures. Zalamea writings serve as a guide to the exhibition but, the artist insists, they are “not as important as the calligraphy itself and the presentation of the drawing “. At the same time he acknowledges that it is also important to present the creative process, a factor which is central to his work presented here.

Gustavo Zalamea, winner of the First Prize at the Salon of Colombian Artists XXX (1986) says is happy to consider new formats in his work. “I still have faith in certain values of creation. Some stay and although others have been reassessed and revised, in the end I’m still modern, “he says, and with this he does not renounce his art as contemporary.

Within this sample are works presented earlier in the year at the MAMBO (Museum of Modern Art – Bogota). They include works from “Tranz” which referrs to “The Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin,. There is also artwork that does not refer to politics but is an interior landscape, based on his studies, of something colorful and more intimate. It is as private as his palettes (which are made of aluminum foil molds) that become sculptures; small works which once again reveal the secrets of the processes Zalamea is willing to reveal.

The movement that shapes his work, it´s recognition of the passing of time and displacement between the outer and inner worlds, between modern art and contemporary art, are clearly seen in this exhibition that highlights the process through the inclusion of his writings. Zalamea recognizes that despite being more of a modern art artist he is also prepared to make changes and takes risks. His work is still progressing, it is still moving.

Biographical Information: Gustavo Zalamea

1951 – Born in Bogotá

1969-1971. Architecture, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá.

1971-1973. Anthropology and Design, University of Concepción, Chile.

Awards

1986. First Prize, XXX Annual Salon of Colombian Artists, National Museum, Bogotá.

1989 – First Prize for Painting, France-Colombia1789-1989 (Contest).

1992 – Premio Casa Andres Bello, Caracas, Andrés Bello Convention, Bogotá. (Contest),

1993 – National Graphic Design Award, Colcultura, National Museum of Colombia.

2003 – Guest of honor of the XII National Chamber of Trade Unions of the Renault Group in Paris and the Festival of Contemporary Art, Barranco, Lima, Peru.

University Jorge Tadeo Lozano
Art Museum
Carrera 4 No. 22-40.

Museum Hours:
Monday to Friday 9:00 a.m. 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Saturdays 10:00 am – 2:00 p.m.

Based on original spanish version of Sara Araújo Castro

Photo by: Gabriel Aponte

Omar Rayo in front of his museum in Roldanillo, Colombia

The Colombian painter and sculptor Omar Rayo, whose work was characterized by colorful geometric shapes, died yesterday Monday 7th June 2010 at age 82 after suffering a heart attack in his native town of Roldanillo.

Three years ago, the artist Omar Rayo suffered 30 hours in a coma when a heart attack almost killed him, but the burly artist managed to recover well from that episode .

At that time, he said that after “escaping death” he began to paint “with the whole alphabet”. His work which were traditionally geometric patterns created in black, white and red now also included the other primary colors of yellow and blue in his work. And so, inspired by his family this new art was presented in the Museum of Modern art in Bogota (Mambo) ‘Toys of Mateo’, as a tribute to his grandson. That was his last exhibition in the Colombian capital.

Roldanillo

“I can´t go on. I’m at the end of my strength.” It is the often repeated phrase heard in recent months the artist Omar Rayo, referring to his efforts to maintain and keep open the  Omar Rayo Museum in Roldanillo, to which all his efforts were devoted.

Omar Rayo Museum, Roldanillo

The strength that radiated from this tall man, whose bushy eyebrows and intense gaze was quickly undermined in recent months, burdened by ill health and anxieties for survival of the Rayo Museum, which he called his “silly son” or folly.

The painter and sculptor Colombian, whose work was characterized by geometric shapes died at age 82, at a clinic in Cali, where he was taken after suffering a heart attack in the house where he lived in Roldanillo near Cali in the south west of Colombia. He died en route to hospital.

Alejandro Mendoza, one of the artist´s assistants, said that Rayo was having breakfast when he collapsed. “We called the police and the hospital, where he was revived and sent to Cali (capital of Valle), but upon reaching the town of Palmira his vital signs worsened and he was dead when he entered the clinic” Mendoza said.

In Roldanillo (Valle del Cauca), the birthplace of Omar Rayo, a vigil  will be held tomorrow at the Museum along with his funeral. In town, the Fire Department is sounding its alarm every hour as a sign of mourning. “The people are sad. People came to the doors of the Museum with long faces. The master teacher was a wonderful person,” said Hugo Fernando Lozano, an employee who has worked for 13 years in the Museo Rayo.

Once while being interviewed in 2006, shortly after recovering from his heart attack, Rayo was asked:

How do you want people to remember you?

and answered:  I want to be remembered as a creator, as I am. Perhaps, a bitter person, perhaps, like a nice person, perhaps, as a person of good humor. I do not know how people see me, but the truth is that I love people and I have no grudges against anybody …

Now the cultural legacy of the artist who devoted his life to Roldanillo in the north of Valle del Cauca, is the Rayo Museo. It was his life and grief. Hundreds of his works remain there. Before he died, his main concern was that the museum would continue its mission.

A life in art

Omar Rayo Painting

Rayo was born on January 20, 1928 in Roldanillo. His first work was embodied in the shadow of a dog that was projected in his room using charcoal. That marked the first contact with white and black, colors which then dominated his works. He began in his teens, thanks to a notice announcing a correspondence course in drawing Zaer Academy of Buenos Aires (Argentina).

From 1948, Rayo began presenting his works at exhibitions and he won the National Salon of Artists of Colombia and a special prize at the First Latin American Print Biennial, San Juan Puerto Rico, in 1970.

From 1959 to 1960 he lived in Mexico, thanks to a grant from the Organization of American States (OAS) and then with another grant was in New York City, where he settled until 1976 and where he had an apartment where he lived much of the year.

In 1981 he founded the Omar Rayo Latin American Drawing and Engraving  Museum, which he also led. His work was focused on geometric shapes such as squares, rectangles and lines with colors.

Most of his remaining works are in his museum.

"Leo Matiz"

La Cometa Gallery will present a tribute to Leo Matiz, born in Aracataca, Magdalena (1917) and who died in Bogotá in 1998 by presenting a particular grouping of his photographs framed within the context of geometry.

It’s a different look at the work of someone who was one of the photographers who set the course in the history of photography in Colombia, with an extensive international route, but almost always associated with his portraits of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as his work done during his travels in the Magdalena River and Mexico.

“Geometry, a tribute to Leo Matiz” is the title of the exhibition which shows photographs taken in the 40s and 50s presenting geometric shapes of architecture and building elements. The lens of Matiz did not just grasp simple facades, but details and elements that impact on their own or could make a combination of contrasts.

Examples of this work is the picture of a hallway with a series of frames, one after another, which appear to run to infinity. He also photographed a roll of wire, an empty oval surrounded by railings, which are visible vertical lines, and a simple brick wall crossed by a ray of light in an almost perfect diagonal, which divides an otherwise dark area lit. Another includes what appear to be oil drilling derricks taken in Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1973. This inquiry about geometry as something of value in photographic images took place at a time when Colombian art was just starting to take its first timid steps in geometric abstraction, something though that the rest of the world had already fully lived through and had indeed entered into the pop-art phase. In many ways, Colombian art has been for much of the 20th centrury behind the curve in international terms. Only “consecrated” artists such as Manzur, Negret or Ramírez Villamizar perhaps fully involved themselves in such works at a similar time in history.

The exhibition is presented in association with the Leo Matiz Foundation, whose director, Alejandra Matiz, stressed that is part of a group of exhibitions that are taking place between June and August by two Berlin galleries on Frida Kahlo and the series “The Forgotten”, one in Oaxaca (Mexico ) and the other in the Spanish Cultural Center in Havana, the theme “Macondo as seen by Leo Matiz”.

"Macondo" as seen by Leo Matiz

As an auxiliary part of the exhibition there will be a second salon with twenty-nine other artists represented including works by Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Fanny Sanín and Manuel Hernández. The exhibition runs through to 21st June 2010.

La Cometa, Cr 10A #94A-25, Bogota.

Information: 601-9494

It was the collapse of stock market in September 2008 leading to global financial chaos that inspired the artist Carlos Salazar Arenas to create his ultimate series of artworks.

While looking for a theme for a new exhibition, Salazar Arenas settled on the images of these brokers, from New York, Germany, Brazil, Japan, France, Singapore, in front of their screens with different gestures. “Although they were different people regardless of where in the world were, anguish was on their faces. It was a desperation and helplessness at what was happening,” said the artist, a graduate of the National University.

At once he started creating a folder of all the photos he could find relating to the event. In it he placed dozens of pictures clipped from newspapers and magazines or downloaded from the Internet, to create the working material for his latest exhibition at El Museo gallery in Bogotá.   Somehow, he felt that what was happening there was also chaos, disorder and even violence, issues that have integrated his work in recent years.

Having collected about 300 images, which were then digitized, he began to work on them. “The editing: close-ups, open, just faces, whole scenes,” says Salazar.

Having analyzed them Salazar chose those he most liked, copied them to canvas and started working with acrylic and brush to make monochromes spots (green, blue, red, orange, purple, etc.), a technique that has marked his style in recent years.

“I take the photo, which is a benchmark of reality. The viewer who sees it recognizes something, but it is not so obvious. It’s an old argument between what is real: the picture or painting.”

The pop-art style that Salazar applies is one that has been around for a while – and most probably there will be other financial crises too. However, for those who like to invest in art then perhaps this works is a good place to start.

“It is not any dream and did not occur at any time in my life” he says. Rojas had left architecture, a career that had disappointed him, and also Bogota to start a new life. That dream was an epiphany.

Rojas was in a dimly lit room “drawing without thinking” with a black marker. Through an open window he heard the sound of the sea. A woman came and gave him the formula of harmony: “Balance centrifugal numbered forms,” a rather cryptic phrase that Rojas made him conscious of that harmony, that he was looking for patterns that are today repeated in his paintings as “something alive” and that “germinate” there.

Both ends of the exhibition hall of the Centro Colombo Americano in Bogota, Rojas has placed two paintings that have organic patterns. In the center, the artist has installed three ‘lights’ over white canvases which lie on the floor. These, canvases as in the drawings in his dream, are drawn with free lines, which create new forms and ways to connect. He chose to add red female seeds to give them body, canvas to canvas, to those forms.

“The exhibition is very educational. I could not do something more revealing about how to build a Danilo artwork” says the artist, who has made four solo exhibitions at the Arte Consultores Gallery in Bogota. This exhibition at the Colombo Americano Center, he says, is the first with non-commercial purposes.

“My work has three words that characterize it: beauty, peace and harmony,” says Rojas, who returned to Bogota to live eighteen months ago. “Ever since I came back, the sizes of my paintings have grown, I think that is because in Europe there is no space and here there is. This has been very important for the development of my work.”

“Calls of Silence”, which ends this Friday, is part of the 2010 season of exhibitions, which is curated by Carlos Blanco.

CENTRO COLOMBO AMERICANO DE BOGOTÁ,

CALLE 19 NO. 2-49 – 10, BOGOTA

TELEPHONE 3347640 EXT. 235

Twins

Ok I admit it . . these works scare me! I am not sure that that is the intention of this Venezuelan artist but they definitely creep me out! Having said that I can also say – I love them! I find them intriguing and fascinating. They have captured my imagination so much I can´t sleep at night!

Mariana Monteagudo is a thirty-something artist from Venezuela who has been working her series of doll sculptures over the last decade.

These ceramic based works seem more like totems than actual dolls as they stand rigid occasionally presenting multiple expressions as in her art that presents twins – apparently Siamese twins – bound together by the extension of a,  once malleable now dry, fixed painted clay surface.

Doll Exhibition

Their facial fragility might also be juxtapositioned with the flexible cloths and hair that adorn these feminine forms – I have yet to see a distinctly male character though some works are presented with the bodies of a dog or some other four legged animal – and if it weren’t for their haunting expressions I´d say these were almost a substitute for the Barbies that surely most girls have played with at some time in their lives.

Mini Beast (2008)

Perhaps due to the proximity of the Caribbean and its African influences these works appear to me as part of a voodoo ritual – an extirpation of femininity and yet a reflection of that self same nature: fragility, intrigue, scorn,motherhood? Most definitely these artworks were created by the mind of a woman. Do the bindings that cover the bodies relate to the swaddling of babes or do they represent the repression that some societies impose on the female form?

Although thousand of miles apart the aura created by these dolls remind me of the paintings of Scottish artist Heather Nevay – where childlike face often present a menacing threat and malign. Strange that two women oceans apart should perhaps extirpate their devils through their art; through children and apparently childhood – each within their own cultural setting and experience.

"Our House" - Heather Nevay

Armando Villegas is a well known listed artist who has lived and worked in Colombia for most of his lifetime. Now in his 80s and suffering from arthritis his output of work is much reduced. I have a beautiful work from 1985 available for sale. It measure 80 x 60cm and was created using the technique of oil and mixed media on canvas. The theme is a “Guerrero”.

The exhibition is being held at the Pera Museum in Istanbul with the collaboration of the Consulate of Colombia, the Spanish Embassy and Instituto Cervantes in Istanbul and includes a selection of 64 paintings organized thematically in six sections: Still lifes, Versions, Bull fights, Circus, Life in Latin America and the Latin American people.

“Still-life” records especially the work belonging to the period of the ’60s, a time when Botero painting is more than an image that goes beyond the simple composition of fruits or objects arranged on a table and often reveal a world of their own right.

“Versions” highlights one of the elements that best characterizes his painting: His ability to combine Latino culture with that of Europe, through different versions of works by masters such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Mantegna, Velázquez and Goya, which were his landmarks paintings after his trip to Italy and Spain in the 50s.

“Bullfighting” is an issue that Botero could never leave out in his work, a fascinating and evocative world that is deeply rooted in the tradition of his people. “I dared to paint the bulls because I was very familiar with the topic. It is impossible to paint if there is no strong relationship between the subject and one’s soul. This relationship is absolutely necessary as it gives you a kind of moral authority. This authority, in my case, sprang from the blood and my own life” Botero once said.

As for the “Circus”, Botero became enamored of this issue in Mexico, where he used to spend the winter months. It was there that he became enthralled by the characters that fill the atmosphere of the circus, colors, movement, and life histories that are part of this show as archaic and time again, which has been immortalized by artists such Picasso, Léger and Chagall, among others.

In his series of works focused on the theme of “Life in Latin America,” Botero insists that “the vitality of the man can not be extinguished even in the worst conditions of poverty in slums, in places where life has no reason apparent. ” There are always towns and ordinary people in these paintings, reflecting a loyalty to his own culture as he vividly recalls his childhood homeland.

And finally, the section of works that relate to “People in Latin America” brings together a group of paintings whose landmarks were the color and sculptures from colonial art, direct and essential language of folk art and in what Concerning the purity of form, pre-Columbian art, for which Botero said: “You can find in my painting a world that I knew in my youth. It´s a kind of nostalgia that has become the focus of my work. I spent fifteen years in New York and lots of time in Europe, but this has not changed anything in my approach to Latin America, the nature and spirit. My connection with my country still exists. ”

Fernando Botero has given a new interpretation to the aesthetics of our time, with the creation and presentation of an original and highly personal work that contains many references to his own culture and his experiences as an artist in his life, but treated with a unique style that challenges the concept of beauty in our century, thanks to the monumental permanent resource, humor, irony and naivete, which combines elements of an admirable mastery of the craft and great talent.