Synopses & Reviews
At the beginning of the nineteen-nineties there irrupted into the panorama of Colombian art the first large-format paintings of Francisco Mejía-Guinand (born in Bogotá, 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 Mejía-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 Mejía-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, Mejía-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 María Escallón remarks in the essays that open this book, Mejía-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."
About the Author
Francisco Mejía-Guinand, (Bogotá, 1964) is a born painter, he cold not avoid it. His childhood visits to the studio of his father, an amateur painter, and the occasions when his mother led him by the hand through the world's great museums may have been responsible for his early interest in art, but his decision to become a full-time painter only came after a long struggle. After studying architecture, he worked as a university professor and in architectural restoration, an experience which taught him what he already knew: that the only thing he wanted to do in life was to paint.
For this reason, everything he has achieved since then has served to confirm the wisdom of his decision to embrace the world of volumes and spaces that the true painter longs for. So, having trusted his intuition and set himself at peace, Mejía-Guinand has devoted himself to constructing a solid universe of planes and colors which this book, the first exclusively dedicated to this artist, stunningly reveals.
Ana María Escallón, a specialist in Latin American art, is currently the director of the Museum of the Art of the Americas in Washington, D.C. as well as a noted journalist, art critic and international curator. In 1997 Villegas Editores published the book Botero: New Works on Canvas, whose main text consists of a long interview with the artist that was done by Ana María Escallón and is considered to be one of the most eloquent testimonies of the life and career of Botero.
In this book, Ana María Escallón places the work of Francisco Mejía-Guinand within the context of comtemporary Columbian art and explains how he has broken new ground as a painter.