Art collection, Aire y agua

INTRO

AIRE Y AGUA

"From this century on, I have wanted to commit to two elements: air and water, and I have been doing it through two plants. The "mazorca de agua" whose immense leaves float in the misty air of our moors and the "Victoria regia" symbolic plant of the jungle that floats in the Amazonian ponds, and that perhaps will cease to exist when our society finds that there is no more wood to cut, no more gold to steal, and when there are no wastelands due to global warming, maybe they will tell our grandchildren when they look at my paintings: This is how the land used to be".
Oscar Alzate, 1951-2018

ARTIST AND WORK

The Narrative

The corpus of works of this collection are the works created by the artist during his last 20 years of life, whose theme is the biodiversity of three fundamental ecosystems of the planet: the paramo, the jungle and the mangrove. The narrative will be the water’s path from its source in the highest paramos, passing through the sub-paramos, jungle swamps and ending in the tangled mangrove, where the water that nourishes the ocean will finally flow.

The "Páramo"

A majestic landscape of the Sumapaz paramo introduces the exhibition, highlighting this ecosystem’s atypicality, rarely approached by landscape painters, followed by the painting series of the "mazorca de agua", an intricate plant with large leaves found in the sub-paramos.

The Jungle

The "Mazorca de agua" allows us to follow the path of the water going down to reach the rivers and jungle pools, such as those that are the habitat for the majestic "Victoria Regia", an aquatic plant that deserves a vibrant series of paintings.

The Mangrove

The exhibition route, like the water, flows into the mangrove, another atypical ecosystem in the landscape that slowly reveals itself before our eyes, and takes shape and meaning only when we dedicate a moment of contemplation to the brushstrokes and the infinite tones that conform it.

Oscar Alzate

•Beginings

I grew up and became an artist thinking and believing that what the computer world is today would forever be a science fiction story. Since 1968 I began to paint and since then I have only stopped doing it to dedicate myself for short periods to working in film, video or sensitive activities for me just as Important. Art for me has been a dream and in that dream I am a castaway lost in space and time and my works are messages thrown between bottles with the illusion that they will reach some miraculous destination.

www.oscaralzate.com

Studies

I studied arts at the Dept School, at the Art District School and at the National Univerity in 1973. I got tired and they got tired of me. So I dedicated myself to photography and experimenting with film, which was very difficult at that time, so in 1977 I decided to dedicate myself to painting. Then I traveled to Paris, where I lived for two years, then I arrived in Colombia where I deserved a scholarship for a Restoration course in Peru. Then I returned back to Colombia to keep painting.

www.oscaralzate.com

Comments

...some writings about Alzate's work.

Together, the works generate a feeling of deep intimacy with the dense vegetation, allowing us to explore the infinite shades and shapes that make up these natural scenes. Alzate's paintings allow us in a certain way to decompose space and study the intricate system on which the wild vegetation of these places is built. Investigation 2017.

ANA MARIA GUERRERO

As if the moon and the sun illuminated the earth and the air, all this almost sacred luminosity and a mythological atmosphere shows us in a poetic and creative way the work of the master Alzate, who visits the forgotten places on which the survival of all depends. Master Alzate continues his protest. -2021-

GLORIA TRIANA

Oscar Alzate's painting process indicates a constancy that brings him ever closer to excellence in storytelling. His care progressively refers to the ability to make us believe in the truth of the rags and surfaces with which these dolls are made. The need to obtain absolute verisimilitude drives him to take more and more care of the trade. Not prompted by the will to lick surfaces. On the contrary, he wants us to realize the grotesque farce around which the existence of so many of us revolves.
Taken from the writing of his first exhibition. -1979-

GALAOR CARBONELL

The Andean landscape reaches an intimate dimension in those paramunos or sabaneros fragments that enhance the humid vegetation of mosses and frailejones, sometimes seen through the window or as an autonomous entity, and always with a discreet palette of subtle and poetic colors.
Taken from: DACONTE, Marceles Eduardo
- The Resources of the imagination. -2010-

EDUARDO MARCELES DACONTE

I really like its landscapes with native flora. Those of moor and river. In them Óscar made a synthesis of the flora in the various layers of our ecosystems. The Andes are there very well sheltered by his balanced gaze. It is in these horizontal formats that his sensitivity and his naturalistic vocation are evident. -2021-

MIGUEL ÁNGEL ROJAS

AIRE Y AGUA

Appreciation

The scenes that are presented in each of the paintings evoke a virgin world, in which the trace of human beings has had no impact. The earthy, green and violet tones make up a quasi-prehistoric, exuberant and impenetrable vision. In this sense, paintings have the ability to transport us to a temporality contrary to that of the contemporary world.

When contemplating these ancient species that appear to possess the territory they inhabit, we are confronted with the extensive cycles in which nature operates. Alzate's work invites us to reflection and contemplation, to devote an attentive look to the details that make up each of the pieces, to truly understand the process on which its forms are built. -Ana María Guerrero.