Indigenous Roots, 2023

Francisco Landazábal  

Francisco Landazábal is a Colombian artist born in 1969 who lives and works in Bogota, Colombia. He grew up in Cartagena, a fortress of the Spanish colonization which is famous worldwide for its historical wealth and natural beauty. In that place full of magic, where the tropics express all its strength and contradiction, he spent his childhood, in front of the sea, the noise of the local people and the exuberant colors of the Caribbean. He studies at the school of Fine Arts of Cartagena and then goes through the workshop of a French artist who had settled in the city. His further studies in philosophy, and the rational component of the aesthetic phenomenon, gave him a much bigger conviction to see art as a serious and structured profession; where respect for a purist technique and the viewer, are fundamental principles in his works from that time. In Landazábal's paintings, everything seems to be resolved between conflicting forces, in tremendous struggles, which are not actually violent, but tending to harmony; therefore, the struggle becomes a game, and is aimed at the improvement of everything created. The artist's consciousness joins that timelessness, and now knowing the material of art and its means of expression, the one who creates a work can forget for a moment what he has learned to allow that greater consciousness to express the forces of nature on the canvas in total freedom. Such is the work that this Colombian artist presents to us today, a symphony of colors and shapes that seek supremacy on the canvas, in movements that are sometimes soft and rhythmic, or strong like the vortex of a tornado, or the portentous force of a galaxy colliding with a black hole. It is a serious and measured abstract painting but; at the same time, so spontaneous that allows the colors to develop in the work with a life of its own, without bias, without a pompous intention, only with a reverent respect for the result that the observer will see… trying to represent each scene on his pictorial metaphysics with the greatest possible meaning, no matter how simple the theme is. The colors appear to swim in almost sculptural shapes and are separated by dark and light areas that delimit the up and down, or the evolutionary movement of these universes.