In this article, the critic Casimiro Eiger reviews Lucy Tejada’s paintings at her first solo exhibition, and discusses the purely formal aspects of her work. In Eiger’s opinion, these elements are closely involved with the artist’s narrative references, and therefore are of vital importance. Eiger suggests that the artist’s thinking and her main concern in these paintings?portrayals of the inhabitants and the landscape of La Guajira?are focused on deepening the composition. He explains that the anecdotal content of the works, that is the forms, line, and color, are subject to that constructive concern. Eiger thus concludes that the strength of Tejeda’s painting lies in her ability to resist a literary narrative, without being totally indifferent to the characteristics of the village in question, as she meditates even more profoundly on the purely pictorial resources she is contemplating. 

In the middle years of the century it was not easy to find a Colombian painter who, in spite of having thoroughly local roots (in the northern peninsula of Colombia, for example), was able to base their work on a constructive technique or a purely pictorial perspective. There is, therefore, current interest in the work of Lucy Tejada (b. 1920), which reveals a harmonious balance between formal aspects and narrative references. 

This article by the Polish art critic Casimiro Eiger (1909–1987), who lived in Colombia, appeared in the catalogue for Lucy Tejada’s first exhibition at the Leo Matiz gallery in Bogotá in June 1952. On this occasion, Tejada’s paintings featured the landscape and inhabitants of the La Guajira peninsula, including works such as Casa Guayú [Guayú House], Cazadores [Hunters], Pastores [Shepherds], Las casas solas [Solitary Houses], Salineros de Manaure [Manaure Saltmarshes], Majuyura melancólica [Melancholy Majuyura], as well as a few portraits that had nothing to do with La Guajira or the Caribbean. Despite the fact that Tejada’s paintings portray local subjects, Eiger’s article endorses the modernist view concerning the importance of the visual elements in a painter’s language. This was the great contribution made by this critic, and others such as Walter Engel and Marta Traba, who supported nontraditional art in the early 1950s.

For more information on Tejada’s exhibition at the Leo Matiz gallery, see: Clemente Airó, “La pintura de Lucy Tejada, el triunfo de una voluntad creadora” [Lucy Tejada’s Painting: The Triumph of a Creative Will], Revista Espiral (Bogotá), no. 41 (July 1952): 10.