MIGUEL ÁNGEL ROJAS. DAMA CHIBCHA, 1986. Partially developed silver gelatin print, metal sheets and stitching 35 x 38 cm. Cortesía Galería La Cometa. © Miguel Angel Rojas. Fotografía: Archivo del artista
With more than fifty years of career, Miguel Ángel Rojas (Bogotá, 1946) is recognized as one of the most important artists on the Latin American scene. Throughout his career he has addressed the pressing social and political issues of Colombia: from drug trafficking and violence, often associated with each other, to education, migration, decolonization, or the exploitation of natural resources. His recognition is also linked to the liberating way in which he has addressed, through the image, homosexuality, in his visits to cinemas where sexual encounters between unknown men were fostered. At the same time, his works of photographic experimentation in the darkroom led him to create pioneering works, in which he introduced aspects of his indigenous-mestizo origin and of his own homosexuality.
In La noche, darkness moves from the dimness of the projection rooms to the black of the charcoal with which the artist creates apparent cartographies of eroded territories, in which he denounces the ruin of the Amazonian landscape devastated by capitalist extractivism. Miguel Ángel Rojas's work has always walked the margins, the limits of the underworld, approaching tragedy while also allowing transcendent readings with messages of profound political and ethical commitment. The exhibition thus follows a path that starts from the ramifications of his most recent works and arrives at the artist's own roots, in a permanent search for racial and sexual identity that brings him close to positions of cultural intersectionality that make it possible to call Rojas a unique artist.
The exhibition, which presents a selection of the main works of his career, reflects the contrast between the recovery of popular and autochthonous values and works that address the tragedy related to Colombian drug trafficking. Installations such as Grano (1980), a work that, through its formal and thematic experimentation, marked a breaking point in the country's art in the early 1980s, propose a poetic and autobiographical reflection on migrations from the countryside to the city in search of a better life. The artist, who grew up in Bogotá, wanted to return to the rural origins of his family in the Tolima region. To this end, he collected different soils from this place to transfer them into a museum room as a support, where he recreates the floor of the dwelling where his grandparents lived. In contrast, works such as El camino corto (2012) use resources close to pop art and its textual messages. Through circular cutouts of coca leaves and dollar bills, the piece interweaves the names of international figures with well-known drug consumption problems, which appear alongside the aliases of the most violent drug traffickers.
Also, the exhibition offers the opportunity to approach the dialogues the artist establishes with his sitters, charged with intimacy and closeness. The work David (2004) is one of the most painful examples of the violence of the war in Colombia. Resulting from work with a soldier maimed by an antipersonnel mine, Miguel Ángel Rojas created an image that today is an emblem of the victims' pain. "The human body is the seat, the sensitive place, the place of pleasure, of pain, of desires, of phobias, of consciousness, of the mind," he states. That body, affected by cultural and economic violence, by inequalities, is also the shadow of a social body that articulates the course of this exhibition.
© Ministerio de Cultura - Gobierno de España