Pedro Nel Gómez, creator of the controversial frescos of the old city palace in Medellín, which at the time of this writing (2009), houses the Museo de Antioquia—explains his reasons for undertaking that major pictorial series. He also provides his own reading of the frescos, emphasizing the structure of the compositions as well as their overarching concern with social issues. Nel Gómez makes reference to Florentine mural painting in order to legitimize these works. In this text, the artist recounts the history of these pioneering murals, and also cites their sources of inspiration. Nel Gomez’s lack of concern with academic rules is clear in this text, as is his interest in realism, his stance on social issues, and his determination to put art at the service of history and collective interests. The painter’s recurring concerns include social issues and problems related to an economy that revolves around gold and oil. In this mural project, Nel Goméz’s primary goal was to make images that speak to the people as well as to the local authorities who worked in the building. In closing, the mural artist discusses briefly the technical demands of the fresco technique, which Nel Goméz had taught himself. Though he deems the fresco medium an ideal form of artistic expression, he did not teach it to his disciples, many of whom hoped to make large murals. To learn how, they had to travel abroad.

With the eleven fresco murals he made from 1935 to 1938 on the walls of the old Medellín city palace, artist Pedro Nel Gómez (1899–1984) formed part of a movement that suddenly transported art from Colombia and from the Department of Antioquia into modernism, breaking with the nineteenth-century tradition as well as incipient local academicism. 

The painter, who was well versed in Renaissance frescos, viewed mural painting as a way to speak to the people. Nel Gómez believed that as in the Middle Ages, the people would find the key to redemption in frescos. Nel Gómez also demonstrated that upheaval, social protest, popular dances, airplanes and other machines, as well as cunning agents of capital who exploited natural resources, could be motifs for painting.  

To make the murals for the Medellín city palace —currently the Museo de Antioquia— Nel Gómez developed a novel technique that differed from the one used in traditional Florentine frescos. Specifically, the technique entailed doing away with the use of white and rendering light and transparency by removing color from the pigment once it had been placed on the surface. It was due to this technique—which Nel Goméz called “carving colorings”—that Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) described these murals, which he visited in person, as “frescos that look like large watercolors.”