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.