Miguel Ángel Rojas
Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango
Author: Marta Rodriguez
ArtNexus No. 68 - Dec 2007
|  | For many years, the work of Miguel Ángel Rojas has been a veritable landmark in Colombian art. As Santiago Rueda remarks, “It is not an exaggeration to call Miguel Ángel Rojas Colombia’s most influential artist today. Irreverent, combative but never dogmatic, Rojas has always stood up for difference, be it sexual, ethnic, cultural, or political. The artist’s field of action is, to put it in broad strokes, the negotiation between dominant trends and vernacular attitudes; between individual freedoms and social forces; between life, art, and political order.”1 The retrospective curated by José Roca reasserted Rojas’s privileged position and presented a deeply coherent and powerful body of work that was created with a sense of refinement and subtlety.
Rojas’s artistic production began in the 1970s, a time when drawing and engraving were the preferred media for a generation of young artists with a new attitude. He has been included as a member of that group for this formal reason, but Roca wonders to which generation does Rojas truly belong, working as closely as he does to the 1990s cohort. If the 1970s generation is defined by formalist interests and a pictorial paradigm and the 1990s generation is understood as more closely connected to experimentalism, then it should be obvious that Rojas is more in tune with the latter. But viewers gathered from this show that Rojas’s work is strongly marked by the expectations of generations of draftsmen who deal with issues of the city, in urban events that are connected to the denizens’ everyday lives. By accessing the everyday, art conveys subjective experience and many aspects of the world, including its social dimension; it breaks the boundaries of what has been called high culture and opens itself to mass culture. With this embrace, the paradigm of the pictorial loses its privilege and gets muddied by interests that go beyond purely formal concerns. Themes become especially relevant and, in the case of Rojas’s development, they require new strategies that break from traditional media.
The show was organized in chronological fashion and accounted for two periods: one with a subjective character and another driven by concerns of a more political nature. In each case, Rojas dealt with difficult topics: homosexuality in the former and religion, drugs, and drug smuggling in the latter. The show’s coherence and power were expressed in closely interconnected ways: the position adopted by Rojas regarding the themes, his deep commitment to them, and his use of artistic media and strategies.
As mentioned earlier, the artists of the 1970s approached themes of life in the city with traditional media such as drawing and engraving. Tenements, bordellos, the movies, magazine images, and comic books were pictorial subjects, and they conveyed art’s socio-cultural context. At this time, Rojas addressed the city via works about the Faenza theater in which he faced his sexual preference. In that centrally located movie house, which is considered a national treasure for its Art Deco architecture and was a cruising location for homosexuals at the time, Rojas found a topic for his subjective period under the titillating images that emanated from the screen. With his prints, semen-stained drawings, and photographic series on the Faenza, Rojas was the first in Colombia to bring up this taboo subject.
Rojas approached the city, and sexuality, from a marginal condition: “Already at that moment I knew that I didn’t fit in and that I would find no opportunities for growth within the boundaries of the normal. That’s why I became an artist. Because the essence of what an artist is, is to go against what is established. I used art as my strength, and this strength helped me find myself, recognize myself, and acknowledge my sexual orientation. My work has run parallel to my life and is fully connected to experience, to my experience.”
This is why the video Golpe en el ojo (A Punch in the Eye, 2002) is so deeply moving. Here, a mature Rojas used video to recover sequences from the Faenza films, accompanied by a heart-wrenching soundtrack. The stills from the 1970s were transformed into movies, gaining new life and mobility; the characters, the close-ups, and the beautifully decayed architecture were present in them, and the grain of the original photographs was magnified. Grano (“grain”) from 1981 was Rojas’s first installation. Using black dirt brought from Girardot, his hometown, the artist made a drawing in the project gallery of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá: a hyperrealist recreation of the tile floor of his childhood. This work was seen as a giant drawing. In that expansion of draftsmanship, the projection toward “real” space, Rojas’s themes began to find the new media and processes. This giant drawing was reinstalled for the retrospective.
In terms of the media he used, Rojas often turned to photography, installation and, in recent years, video. His paintings from 1990 were excluded from the retrospective, but the included works revealed a strong visual language dominated by black and white. Rojas learned this language along with others from his generation, and he employed it in his earliest prints, in which he found an object of desire and self-knowledge in a jean- and boots-clad male figure. David is a series of photographs of a beautiful soldier in the pose of Michelangelo’s David, his leg mutilated by an anti-person mine commonly used in Colombia’s civil war.
Coloring the whole show, Rojas’s use of black and white connected the lead or charcoal pencil to the tonal values of black-and-white photography. This strong palette was present in Rojas’s earliest drawings, in which he recreated images from the martial-arts movies shown in the Faenza theater. These early large drawings revealed a refined draftsman who was passionate about his craft and used it wisely to speak of the world that affected him. The enormous gray bodies in these drawings were painstakingly created, and in them viewers could see the time devoted to their construction and the artist’s record of what lies under the gaze—desire, affection, and estrangement. Rojas’s exquisite mastery of the black-and-white language was clear in the series of photographs of the Faenza, in which he captured random homosexual encounters using a hidden camera.
A few years later, Rojas brought light directly into his work and moved from a subjective to an objective position in a series of partially developed photographs that addressed violence and drugs. This theme touched him deeply: “I locked myself in the darkroom and fired a light beam at the negative, creating a light drawing. The works from the 80s and 90s, like Caloto, allude to chaotic situations, to the violence of the ‘extraditable,’ and to drugs, the dislocated euphoria in which I was then immersed. That’s how involved I felt.”
This involvement, this commitment, extends to his most recent works. The issue of drugs and drug trafficking is hard, as difficult as the previous one of homosexuality, and it is easy to make art that falls into cliché. But Rojas, a refined, well-trained, and passionate draftsman with a clear position on the issue of drugs, used tiny points cut from coca leaves to put together phrases and name cities like Medellín and New York. With this simple action and the selected material, Rojas alluded to the traffic that links drug producers and consumers.
Regarding his position on this topic, Rojas says, “There is a sense of justice in my work as a whole. When you see the news that foreign planes come to contaminate the countryside, the waters, to make the children sick, it is impossible not to feel chills. This is why Santa, [composed] of four photographs, was born of feelings of rage, [for] what rains there is poison.” Seen from a distance, this work resembled a beautiful landscape on which a phrase from the Catholic Christmas ritual has been inscribed with white dots: “Como bienhechor rocío como riego santo.” Up close, one discovered that the white dots were small skulls. This image evoked our contemporary condition, our beliefs, our religion, and our harsh reality. The work Gringos played with humor; the large work was painstakingly created using coca leaves chewed by a kind of ant known to peasants as “gringos” for their taste for coca.
The retrospective included two videos. In one documentary-like work, a soldier was shown as he washed his face with his arm stumps, the result of an explosion in the Caquetá region. The other video, Mirando la flor (Watching the Flower, 1979–2007), functioned as a triptych. In the middle, an afflicted man talked incessantly in an inaudible voice, but his gestures and clothes revealed a man destroyed by drugs. On each side was a photograph of the same man several years earlier, looking at the picture of a flower: two different times, with drugs in the middle.
The theme of religion was present in the work Still Life and of a new version of Dogma. Like Rojas’s use of coca leaves, the former played with the symbolism of the objects and the chosen materials. This work was presented at the fortieth National Artists Salon, “A Place in the World”. On that occasion, Rojas used bocachicos, a contaminated species of fish found in the Magdalena River. “This extremely simple intervention,” Santiago Rueda commented, “responded [to the artist’s] desire to comment on the inoperative state of Christian doctrine in a space freighted with history, in which we clearly see the imposition of one type of thinking over another: Christianity obliterating native cultures. The dead fish became a symbol of that anachronism. The gold leaf symbolizes the power of the Church as an institution and the death of mythical thinking. At the same time, this is Rojas’s first work to refer to current food-security issues. A native fish such as the bocachico becomes a metaphor for our life’s current state, diversity, and conflicts around economics and genetics.” For the Salon, the work was exhibited outside, and the fishes’ state of decomposition was evident.
Like others of his generation, Miguel Ángel Rojas turned toward his surrounding context, as Hal Foster would say, as if on a horizontal axis; in this, his commitment to the issues has been a guiding principle. But Rojas retains an attitude connected to a vertical axis: to quality and artistic tradition, especially that of draftsmanship. Throughout the retrospective, one perceived Rojas’s training as a draftsman. Encompassing subjective and collective experience, Rojas’s draftsmanship is characteristic of an artistic current that understands art as a means for intimate expression, as an act of affirmation and salvation.
This commitment to his craft and his issues was clearly present in the exhibition, which also included Rojas’s 1982 installation Subjective at Alonso Garcés Gallery. In this powerful hyperrealist work that included sounds and smells, Rojas used graphic techniques such as serigraphy and frottage to recreate the atmosphere of the Faenza’s bathrooms into the gallery. Rojas presented the viewer with the worn tiles, the mildew-stained walls, and the rumblings of the plumbing system—an entire environment of loneliness and decadence. With Subjective, Miguel Ángel Rojas brought the 1990s language of installation to the Faenza experience, which he quietly began almost two decade earlier.
NOTE
1. Santiago Rueda, Arteria, Year 3, December, 2007-May, 2008, page 6.
*Images courtesy of Galería Alcuadrado. |  |
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