Mejia-Guinand

At the beginning of the nineteen-nineties there irrupted into the panorama of Colombian art the first large-format paintings of Francisco Mejia-Guinand (born in Bogota, 1964). In the Colombia of that time, which was characterized by an interest in "art as idea", most young artists were devoted to the most diverse varieties of conceptual art. Given that context, a work, like that of Mejia-Guinand, which does not try to "mean" but only "to be" is admirable. Despite the current belief that painting has reached its end, the pictures that illustrate this book demonstrate its falseness. Within Colombian painting of the past decade, the work of Mejia-Guinand is unique in demonstrating a strict respect for the tradition of painting as an artistic medium. His large formats are radical: they have no beginning or end and transform our notion of space. They are fragments of a totality which nourishes itself on the legacy of the history of world art. He does not reject this history. On the contrary, he restores the past in order to go beyond it, doing it with the humility of someone who looks at the world for the first time but never stops being himself. A novel figure within Latin American art, Mejia-Guinand covers an ample terrain of pictorial references and requires the spectator to undertake a penetrating contemplation of his work. As the noted Colombian art critic Ana Maria Escallon remarks in the essays that open this book, Mejia-Guinand's pictures are "images that are mute because they resort to the inner voice and in which color speaks for itself. They are intimate areas which reveal their significance in the luminosity of a green, the tactile vision of a blue or the silence of an emphatic black. The very moment when painting, with its capacity to give meaning, evokes all things."