Economist by training, artist by heart. New to Vancouver, via Europe and the US. 100% Colombian. Wanderlust / Bildungsroman.

Economist by training, artist by heart. New to Vancouver, via Europe and the US. 100% Colombian. Wanderlust / Bildungsroman.

Art for me is an escape from the routine of the daily life. It serves two main purposes. First, to fill an existential void, to transcend, to connect. In that way I take Kandinsky seriously, in particular his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with its deep concern about meaning, even under increasing abstraction. Art provides for me that aesthetic connection to something larger than us, to a cannon that has been there for millennia, and will still be there when we are gone, and which has the power—one hopes—to bring us together as a species. At the same time, art is also a way for me to canalize some internal demons. I paint in a cathartic way, a good example of that is my latest canvas, Matarife. It is a butchered ox, as in Rembrandt, blood dripping and all. Quite gory and violent, one could say, but I actually find it quite soothing, not only aesthetically so, but also thanks to the process that brought it about. An artistic process of trying to make the piece better, bit by bit. Painting then is, for me, like writing. Writing in the Coetzian sense, as in Disgrace, where even the most objectively awful things can be described so beautifully, that they end up providing an almost existential response to the question of the meaning of life. It becomes then a liberating action, where we can be anyone we want, fiction in color, in composition, in brushstroke, fiction in art.

Art for me is an escape from the routine of the daily life. It serves two main purposes. First, to fill an existential void, to transcend, to connect. In that way I take Kandinsky seriously, in particular his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with its deep concern about meaning, even under increasing abstraction. Art provides for me that aesthetic connection to something larger than us, to a cannon that has been there for millennia, and will still be there when we are gone, and which has the power—one hopes—to bring us together as a species. At the same time, art is also a way for me to canalize some internal demons. I paint in a cathartic way, a good example of that is my latest canvas, Matarife. It is a butchered ox, as in Rembrandt, blood dripping and all. Quite gory and violent, one could say, but I actually find it quite soothing, not only aesthetically so, but also thanks to the process that brought it about. An artistic process of trying to make the piece better, bit by bit. Painting then is, for me, like writing. Writing in the Coetzian sense, as in Disgrace, where even the most objectively awful things can be described so beautifully, that they end up providing an almost existential response to the question of the meaning of life. It becomes then a liberating action, where we can be anyone we want, fiction in color, in composition, in brushstroke, fiction in art.