In this text, art critic Ana María Escallón discusses three basic phases in the work of Colombian painter Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar: a first experimental stage; a second stage of searching and inner exploration; and a third stage marked by consolidation. Escallón demonstrates how these phases took shape, mixed and overlapped during the course of Ramírez Villamizar’s life. On the basis of examples drawn from Ramírez Villamizar’s pictorial work, the text provides a brief chronological overview of the artist’s beginnings as a figurative artist, his expressionist period, and his discovery of geometry. In “La Pintura de Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar,” Escallón argues that it was in the medium of painting (not sculpture) that Ramírez Villamizar forged his path, until becoming a major figure in Colombian art.

This critical article by Ana María Escallón (b. 1954) is one of the few texts on the pictorial work of Colombian artist Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1922–2004). In Colombia and beyond, Ramírez Villamizar is widely recognized as a sculptor, one whose work revolves around geometric abstraction and Constructivism. In this text, however, Escallón goes back in time to analyze Ramírez Villamizar’s early years as a painter.

This text discusses how the artist developed due to his dedicated effort in the sphere of drawing and painting; Ramírez Villamizar would rework and erase images until he ultimately found what he was looking for. As this text demonstrates, his work in geometric abstraction and sculpture is just one phase in a long career. His experimentation with a number of different tendencies, formats, materials, conceptions, and media—including painting, drawing, sculpture, relief, abstraction, figuration, expressionism, watercolor, oil paint, wood, metal, acrylic, and color—demonstrates that the strength and importance of his work is not borne of chance encounter, but instead of a life of deliberate study and dedication.

Significantly, Ramírez Villamizar’s painting changes from one tendency to another, and the use of certain materials and formats reflects more than aesthetic interest or visual exploration: the historical context, as well as the artist’s specific emotional state, led to repeated changes in his painting. Escallón claims that Ramírez Villamizar’s work from the fifties was a direct response to the extreme violence gripping Colombia at the time. The physical contact, skulls, demons, and death—and quick and violent brushstrokes—in works like El Matadero [The Slaughterhouse], Lucha de Jacob y el Ángel [Struggle Between Jacob and the Angel], Calvarios [Stations of the Cross], and San Sebastián [Saint Sebastian] make these works representations of the situation in Colombia at the time. According to Escallón, “Ramírez’s painting represents an experimental process with highly differentiated periods. The passage from one stage to another, from one theme to another, was due not only to deep artistic feeling, but also to a personal artistic tendency that brings together two different dimensions: emotional reason and aesthetics.”