In this article, the Colombian poet and critic Jorge Gaitán Durán (1924–1962) writes about Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1922–2004) a promising twenty-four-year-old artist who was exploring the potential of modern painting. Both men were from the state of Norte de Santander, and were working to make names for themselves in the art world in Bogotá.
This article documents the emergence of new artistic languages in Colombia in the 1940s, in painting and sculpture as well as in the field of art criticism. This article appeared in the Revista de las Indias [Indies Magazine] (published by the Ministry of Education), in a section on the “Visual Arts” that featured discussions on painting, sculpture, theater, and music. It is interesting to note that an official magazine saw fit to support modern art movements and invite a critic who was barely twenty-three years old at the time to write about emerging artists. This demonstrates that in those days, artists in Colombia were in a position to promote an understanding of the languages of modern art.
In the late 1940s, Ramírez Villamizar started exploring the language of abstraction, which would influence all his subsequent work. It is interesting to note how art criticism was developing hand-in-hand with the development of the visual arts. As the poet was establishing his critical credentials, the artist was experimenting with the three-dimensional and geometric expression in which he excelled during the mid-twentieth century.
In 1947, Jorge Gaitán Durán, a young member of the upper class, was one of the most promising poets and intellectuals in Colombia. He had studied law at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and often wrote about art exhibitions and aesthetic matters. Early that year he and the critic Luis Vidales Jaramillo (1900–1990) organized the Salón de Artistas Jóvenes [Young Artists’ Salon], an event that introduced the work of many Colombian masters in the field of modern art, most notably Edgar Negret (b. 1920) and Ramírez Villamizar.