This article published in the “Lecturas Dominicales” or Sunday Readings section of the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo (April 1962) evidences the polemic surrounding abstract and figurative art in Colombia at the time. In the introduction to the article, cultural journalist Jorge Moreno Clavijo asserts that the public was confused by the range of positions and assessments regarding the issue. To help remedy that situation, he hosted a conversation between three painters and one critic: Gonzalo Ariza, Luis Alberto Acuña, Enrique Grau, and Eugenio Barney. The last three agree that the distinction between abstraction and realism is artificial; it is, in their view, a result of commercial, rather than artistic, concerns. For these three, a work of art’s aesthetic value is tied to intrinsic factors related to expression, not to the forms that the artist employs. They warn of the prejudices that come from the artistic tradition—mainly, a preference for recognizable figures—and indicate the importance of abstraction in the evolution of art over the course of history starting in antiquity. Ariza, on the other hand, openly opposes abstract art due to both its commercial nature and its inability to evidence “the national.” From different points of view, then, the article analyzes the importance of abstraction in aesthetic tendencies of the time, while also assessing the place of realism.

For two main reasons, this article is an important source for efforts to reconstruct the polemic surrounding abstract art in Colombia in the sixties. First, it heeds different voices in its analysis of the conflict between proponents of abstraction and proponents of realism: the opinions of Enrique Grau and Luis Alberto Acuña—who had done both abstract and figurative work—are expressed, as is that of Gonzalo Ariza, who had explored the Colombian landscape in the language of realism. The article also contains the opinion of critic Eugenio Barney, director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes at the time. Thus, the text attempts to encompasses disparate points of view as it addresses a specific aesthetic phenomenon, one that was central to all those involved in Colombian art at the time. 

It is interesting that all of the participants in the discussion except Ariza claim that the opposition between abstraction and figuration had been overcome and, as such, it did not provide criteria on which to assess the quality of works. This indicates that, by this time, abstract art was no longer met with prejudice in Colombia; it was, rather, analyzed on the basis of historical and social criteria. This is evident in the words of Barney and Acuña. The former places abstract art in a socioeconomic framework and the latter sees it as the result of a process of aesthetic evolution that can be traced through history. This makes sense since the article was published in 1962, by which time abstract art had been on the Latin American art scene for more than two decades. Indeed, in Colombia, there were a number of well established abstract artists, such as Marco Ospina Restrepo (1912–1983) and Omar Rayo (1928?2010).

This text is fundamental to researchers working on this debate because it evidences the reasons that abstract art was able to develop in Colombia in the sixties. The article also makes use of novel channels of communication with the public that had been impossible previously due to the inability to reach a broad audience or to analyze aesthetic procedures outside established tradition.