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Artist Exhibitions:
INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITS
• “Beyond the touchable”, as
part of the project “Art
trough senses”, Franz Mayer
Museum. Asociacion Ojos que
Sienten, A.C. and Banco Bilbao
Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) -
Bancomer. Mexico DF, Mexico.
June 25th to July 29th, 2009
(Scheduled exhibit).
• “Genoma”, Una Foto
Escuela-Fototeca de Entre
Rios. Curator: Eduardo ...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Represented in Panama, Panama
by:
La Galería Arteconsult
Calle 50 entre 72 y 73 San
Francisco
Apartado Postal 0834-2111
Tel. (507)302-2646/ 47/49
artecons@cableonda.net
Panamá, Panamá
Represented in Santiago, Chile
by:
Galería Andrés Hermosilla
andreshermosilla@andreshermosil
la.cl
http://www.galeriaandreshermosi
lla.cl/
Represented ...
Further Information
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Collections:
• Private collection of Gordon
Froud, Johannesburg, South
Africa
• Museum of the Honduran Man,
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
• National Gallery of Art,
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
• Museo Internazionale
Dinamico di Arte
Contemporanea, Italia.
• Candido Bido Museum,
Dominican Republic
• International Center of
Contemporary Art. Cordoba,
Spain
• Itinerant Museum of
Contemporary Art of,
ITIMUSEUM, Argentina
• Honduran Institute...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Jorge Restrepo:
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Studied drawing and painting at the Art Academy of the San Ignacio School, in Medellin, Colombia, with Master Gabriel Duque S.J. Paints since 1971. His work has been collected in different countries like Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Holland, Honduras, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, M¨¦xico, Moldova, Nicaragua, Rumania, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom, Surinam, Sweden, South Africa, Taiwan and USA.
Jorge has undergrad studies as agronomist, and post grad studies in Public Administration (MPA, Harvard University) and Business Administration.
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Conversions by Jorge Restrepo
By: Ram¨®n Caballero
Art critic
In a certain sense art is causal because it takes us first from sensation and emotion to intuitive and intellectual attention, freeing us¡ªthanks to this complicated crossing over¡ªfrom denotative subjugations. This work manages to make these ontological gaps a part of its march, initially keeping within a system of codes that gives it its shape. In order to come through unscathed, the work should not only be familiar with homologies and vertebral affinities; but also with replacements and displacements in order to attain novelty, projection and autonomy at the same time. In order to be effective, the conceptual and formal material should enter into an interactive stylistic enclosure that has the capacity to extend, suppress and exchange with certain precision. When this does not happen (we understand), we prefer to speak of contingencies.
In Jorge Restrepo¡¯s Black Moons (2007-08), the solution has been wrought. It is unquestionable that his conscious intertextual attachment has led him to achieve this simple, but substantial graphic authority. In his initial work, this statement of his polyglot vocation was already there. It insinuated that his future was not to perfect a style, but rather to explore a multimodal system: figurative, expressionist, abstract, geometric, lyrical, etc. Over time, this hybrid condition has glided along a favorable interdisciplinary slope, above all, for the happening and the painting of collective execution.
When we return to Black Moons, it is no longer difficult to know that when it comes to surfaces, Restrepo works with negatives, buried in an almost-expressive/almost-rigorous scheme. At the beginning, his work was either a mass of faces packed in ¡®niches¡¯ of rapid strokes; or otherwise there was a mass of hidden (and tattooed) countenances behind a curtain of thick calligraphy. Over the years it turned out that it was Mondrian, who could be seen in those cloisters filled with physiognomies. The process of camouflage was ready: Piled up portraits were converted into reticles. Clearly, this was the shift: the primacy of the ergonomic and the immersion of the organic; consequently, the surfaces are like pentagons. Undoubtedly, the pre-Moon work had to cross this interactive center; and if the number of times is to serve us for validating the judgment, let it suffice us to say that many beginnings and vast interrogations have taken place there.
Upon observing this series, we should insist on the structural details, above all in his language. The first thing that should be noted is his ¡®radioactive¡¯ program. There the hegemony of space has been substituted very soon by a giddy gradation of leaps, lumps, fissures and floor tiles that are denser in the center and then lost in those incredible outcroppings¡ and then the sensitive, white, empty space, already immobile because of the paper's perimeters. Returning to the center, we are in front of a constellation of polygons and intact filaments, which if they were rounder, no one would make an effort to sharpen them to more than some figurative melody by Modigliani, or something less suprematist by Malevich, or to a less ¡®mathematizing¡¯ Variant (1939) by Vantorgeloo. Something of Georges Mathieu has also been placed in this ¡®lunar¡¯ neighborhood¨Dsurely those signs on flat backgrounds, which like thick signatures spread out over the paper.
While this occurs in the ¡®elevations¡¯ of his work, something different is shown on the ¡®ground floor.¡¯ His graphic winks at the surrealist rubbings of Ernst, with no other alternative than exalting the relief of the stickers, whose anatomy on the other hand benefits from the history of the collage. Despite everything, it cannot be forgotten that in the Black Moons every ¡®appropriation¡¯ has its reverse. Differences. What has never been preceded.
The symbolic now remains open to the affinities of the public. There can be aerial photographs of a city besieged by war, with its fallen street tiles and its streets filled with soot; or a dressing table, forgotten in the face of the proximity of a tumult; or the introspective image of someone whose childhood was more familiar with the rough thrusts on the paper than the lullaby of his species.
In any case there has to be a lot of distance between the beginning of the artistic communication and its end; therefore, we would be in disagreement with those who would deposit the meaning of the work in just one factor of the process. What is certain is that the meaning of the work is something that takes place during the course of its realization as a message, where the artist, the object and the spectator are not valid if they are isolated. To a certain extent, we are the meaning of the work; the other occupies it; the object is a signal. The work is, in and of itself, a meaning that spins between the objective and the subjective. What happens to Black Moons is, in reality, reversibility, the transcendence that only we can give it and that only it can give to us. A dialog for certain.
Even so, what is Black Moons? A negative of geometry, of the square, of the absolute, of plenitude. A trance that inverts the line in mystery and the moons¡ªformerly stained by howls, caresses and death¡ªinto something more than geometry and also into something more than an allegory of the indivisible. We must insist that Restrepo works with mutations, cracks and hiding places; consequently, this same moon has to represent some reaction against the ¡®hard¡¯ geometry of the Vanguard, without losing sight of the fact that this is also true of some of his own paintings, above all those in which the faces lie under the strips of his first realism.
After all, no one can stop us from associating his work with the intimate eurhythmics, to the sobs or to the fullness of the times in the paintings by the Honduran Ricardo Aguilar (1915-1951), who left proof that the moon is, besides being a heavenly body, a self-sufficient metaphysical shape. This was also woven into Black Moons. They are questions posed to the cosmos¨Dalthough in a more earthly way for not forgetting that here, in addition to contemplation, there is action, as in the war exercise. Is that perhaps the reason why Restrepo¡¯s moons are transient beings and that they only know how to express their uprootedness as occurred in The legend of the Nile (1937) by Paul Klee,?
Tegucigalpa, February 14th , 2008
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