Gone, Here, the title that Luis Fernando Roldán (Colombia, 1955) has chosen for his recent paintings and sculptures exhibition summarizes, as through a ‘Nadaist-like’ lightning, the history of Western representation: there where an absent occurred -gone-, a new presence is produced by art -here. Artists and art thinkers have addressed this issue since antiquity. Two millennials ago, Plinius recalled the anecdote about the origin of painting: the daughter of the potter Butades, seeing her lover about to leave her, traced his shadow’s profile on a wall. The story continues as the potter would add relief to it, inventing sculpture. Gone, Here, Roldán’s show, beautifully declines these foundational narratives: a painter, whose production in abstraction has spanned for the last 40 years, Roldán is also a potter, a sculptor whose interest for the plasticity of matter has recently blossomed in a series of ambiguous, zoomorphic, baroque-like ceramics. His paintings, abstract, landscape-like gestural compositions, made of masterfully colored fields and tangled tracings resonate vis-à-vis a long tradition of painting in Colombia characterized by the richness of surfaces and the ambiguity of forms, from the seminal artists Andrés de Santa María to Judith Márquez, Juan Antonio Roda and Manuel Hernández. Roldán’s transformative contribution to this history manifests here in the dialogue between paintings and ceramics, where the pictorial eloquence translates into a repertoire of zoomorphic objects, nameless things of beauty coming out from the fluid denseness of the paintings.

Luis Pérez-Oramas

Gone, Here

LUIS ROLDÁN

In 1546 there was a debate about the superiority of painting or sculpture, a discussion that remained relevant for two centuries to decide which of these two arts could most faithfully represent reality. There was even a famous survey at the time in which an Italian poet asked his contemporaries for their opinions on the matter. With a range of responses whose only constant was the idea that painting was an art of speculation and sculpture one of truth, the Italian poet was forced to conclude that they were both daughters of the same noble rank. Much later, in a letter to a friend, Michelangelo, who also participated in this debate, wrote that it was pointless, that an artist, before asking himself about such things, should devote himself to making. What he did confirm is that "painting and sculpture share the same end, as difficult to obtain with one as with the other," an end he never specified nor told us how to reach.

Gone, Here is a show that once again revives those concerns, a tension that has been a constant in Luis Roldán's practice and that has never been far from his previous work. Since the beginning, his paintings have always questioned their own limits; that is, they are compositions whose lines, forms and colors crash into the edge, as if they wanted to go beyond the frame. This brings into question the reliability of their representation, and it opens a space for doubting the status given to painting by the medium's own history of autonomy and self-sufficiency. In that sense, it was only a matter of time before he escaped the two-dimensional format he had always worked in to discover another space for play and apparition. That space is now in these ceramic sculptures—but also in their supports. Amidst a world of throwaway things, Roldán finds that a rusted metal cage or a cast-off piece of broken ladder can become the perfect pedestal for holding a work, a gesture that is also a struggle against time: that which is garbage for us is for him a ruin that acquires new life thanks to the artifice of art.

One might say these ceramics are a renunciation, or at least a distancing—that this is no longer painting. Quite the contrary, however. This exhibition shows a stubborn need to question painting, to understand it, to expand it. It is an exercise in radical imagination. Roldán once again challenges his habitual format, but also the time and space in which it happens. In the end, this space created by the artist is a place of fiction. Absent even the slightest intention to make painting and sculpture function as a kind of reliable representation or truth, it does ask us about what we are presented with as real. The game is to create a liminal space, a kind of threshold between the rational and the irrational, dreaming and wakefulness, the conscious and unconscious. Thus, it seems logical and rational for these ceramics, with the amorphous forms of nearly unrecognizable animals, to reveal themselves to us as grotesqueries. Or for these containers, instead of harboring life, to transform themselves into another kind of deformed reality.

Ximena Gama

Translated by Camilo Roldán