Entitled “En la historia” [In History], this introduction to Después del límite [Beyond the Limit] summarizes critic and researcher María Iovino’s thinking on drawing and painting. Iovino asserts that Paul Cézanne was one of the artists that transformed pictorial language, making way for new formulations of representation. On this premise, she analyzes new conceptions of “the pictorial” and how they have been appropriated locally. “The analysis is grounded on the premise that painting is the matrix that has generated the intellectual guidelines that have mobilized creative development in the 20th century,” states the Colombian author.

Después del límite forms part of the compilation Proyecto Pentágono [Pentagon Project], a project carried out under the auspices of the Colombian Ministerio de Cultura in the year 2000. The aim of Proyecto Pentágono was to perform a series of research projects that would encompass Colombian art and its processes. The project proposed five traveling exhibitions organized by the following researchers: Juan Fernando Herrán (born 1963), researcher on photography and video; Consuelo Pabón, researcher on art, body, and thought; Jaime Cerón (born 1967); Humberto Junca (born 1968), researcher on 3D images; María Iovino (born 1961), researcher on drawing and painting; Javier Gil (born 1955); and María Claudia Parias (born 1967), researcher on art, fashion, and apparel. These individuals were charged with the task of presenting Colombian artists whose work attested to the state of art in Colombia at the time. Though the exhibitions never took place, the organizing body did publish a compilation of their research. 

In “En la historia” (the introduction to Después del límite), María Iovino offers a series of observations geared to understanding the essence of two languages (drawing and painting) that she views as bound together not only as forms of thought but also as forms of action. She explains how the fields of action and comprehension of those two languages have expanded. This text precedes Iovino’s discussion of the artists who, in her view, have been crucial to laying the basis for the development of drawing and painting in Colombia, artists such as Bernardo Salcedo (1939–2007), Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982), and Beatriz González (born 1938). 

This text is significant in that Iovino includes references to the context, thus providing greater understanding of how classical forms of expressions like those analyzed here have been reformulated in recent Colombian art. Drawing and painting are, in this text, understood to be tools at the service of an interpretation of reality and new forms of representation. Iovino’s explanation allows for a redefinition of concepts (abstractions based on artistic practice) that expand conceptual, as well as spatial, limits.

María Iovino is a Colombian curator, researcher, and art critic whose work is geared to a revision of modern and contemporary art from Latin America. Her formulations facilitate greater insight and critical reading of recent art.