Juan Acha examines the rationale advanced by those who, in line with the “new pictorial awareness” of the middle of the century, see greater relevance in abstract painting than in the outdated values of the figurative ideal. The main idea underpinning the argument concerns the historical meaning of the work of art. Acha suggests that the suppression of the image is a natural step within the context of recent aesthetic, sociological, and technical history. The “anti-rationalist and anti-naturalist demands” of the abstract aesthetic, as well as its rejection of any references to the empirical and intellectual world and all “realistic meaning,” are intrinsic to contemporary scientific views and to the artistic reality from which this kind of work emerges. In Acha’s opinion, abstract art advocates a recognition of the “primary vitality” of mankind, thus encouraging a “new spirituality” that seeks to ground the pictorial event in the emotions; abstract art therefore proposes a “new vision” of reality. He thinks that this “new aesthetic” has not been well received because the public, on the whole, rejects its “precocious power” in favor of what it represents, a question that belongs to the field of rationalist concerns that, in Acha’s view, are utterly foreign to the field of art.   

According to Juan Acha (1916–1995), the Peruvian theoretician and critic who lived in Mexico, abstract art represents the high point of the avant-garde’s “subjectifying impulse,” whereas the naturalist aesthetic, which now defines figurative painting, lacks all relevance at this time when the visual arts no longer have anything to do with the stagnant values of illustration or the role of art as a source of information. In Acha’s opinion, a work of art’s historical meaning is what determines its universal value. That is, the suppression of the figure is a response to multiple historical demands because it provides continuity for the preceding avant-garde’s work and for the trend toward specialization (that was at its peak at the time) as a reaction to the scientific over-exploitation of nature and the arrival of photography and its derivative forms of expression. Abstract art would recognize “emotional priorities (…) as a way of experiencing ineffable, inaccessible, super-sensitive worlds” that implied an awareness of aesthetic worlds in keeping with widespread sensibilities in postwar Europe, where Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, for example, were among those who were trying to answer historical questions and wondering about the connections between science and war.     

This article appeared in Eco magazine (1960–1984) in early 1961. At the time, Eco stood out in the field of intellectual discussion in Colombia because of its rejection of the idea of a national myth, which was in stark opposition to the rest of the critics for whom nationalism was a major concern within the spectrum of social, political, and artistic issues. Eco referred to itself as “a magazine of western culture” and, at least during its first fifteen years, it had a distinctly European outlook, focused on Germany. Through articles such as this one by Acha (who was not Colombian), Eco’s attitude had a positive influence on Colombian critics who revered nineteenth-century criollista [Latin American] values over all other kinds of art. As part of an explicit campaign to promote European culture, Eco published articles by Acha, who believed that abstract art “complements, enriches, and broadens the horizons of painting.” Despite its focus on foreign culture, however, the magazine was well received in Bogota’s intellectual and artistic circles whose galleries and art salons were filled with abstract works that had been in vogue in Colombia since the 1940s.