“Con la derecha” [With the Right], an article included in the book Cu4rto Nivel arte contemporáneo [Fo4rth Level Contemporary Art] and written by the Colombian curator Ana María Lozano, is a very detailed review of the work by the same name created by Humberto Junca in 2006. It includes a very precise description of the three series of drawings in the exhibition: Con la derecha, Ornamento y delito [Ornament and Crime], and Damn Right. These drawings have been rendered on the arms of school desk chairs that have already been scratched and vandalized by their teenage users. Junca has drawn cultural and political symbols on some of them, using the same ink and materials that the students used on the painted wood. Lozano suggests that the Con la derecha series expresses the idea of subversion in two different ways: in the anonymous visual manifestation of the students who defied the school authorities, and in Junca’s gesture vis-à-vis the artistic authorities in exhibiting the arm of a school desk chair in a space reserved exclusively for the exhibition of visual art. This is because the arms of these desk chairs have only been worked on by the original students. Ornamento y delito and Damn Right address a combination of symbolic nets whose content is irreconcilable, according to the author, as in the case of the portrait of a Colombian president juxtaposed with the logo of a Dark Rock band, thus recording, in the logic of a palimpsest, both the appropriation and an iconographical imbalance. The chapter includes 5 color photographs of the work.

This document paves the way for future exploration, research, or reviews of the work of the Colombian artist Humberto Junca (b. 1968). It provides a solid frame of reference that could be used to analyze or reveal associations, plays on words, and intentional contradictions that appear in “Con la derecha” and in the majority of Junca’s works. It is thus possible to follow a thread that winds through Junca’s works based on Ana María Lozano’s essay. This also implies a contemplation of the art scene in Colombia in the last ten years (1999 – 2009) because Junca has been an active protagonist in the field and has influenced other artists during that period. The document also reveals the curatorial and exhibition activities of the Bogotá gallery Cu4rto Nivel arte contemporáneo, a nonprofit organization that was founded in 2003 and has continued to provide space for the promotion of emerging artists and projects that sometimes defy the logic of the local art market. 

Humberto Junca’s work focuses on marginal aspects of the culture: the uses and hierarchies of cultural icons, handcraft technologies that have been left behind by technological advances, and the difficult relationship between local work and global discourses. These can be seen in works such as El mal vestido [The Bad Dress] (1999), which consists of three letters in a gothic typeface printed on used jeans that, together, spell the word MAL [BAD]. They are overlaid with metal crosses and drawings in ballpoint ink that evoke forms of urban tribal identification and differentiation, and refer to conceptual art or perhaps the social censorship that condemns urban customs of this kind.   

Junca has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Colombia, the United States, Finland, and Germany, including: Acto reflejo [Reflex Act] (2007) at the Bogotá Planetarium; Constant Disturbance (on cultural contamination and foreign agents) (2006) at the Centro Cultural Español in Miami; and Metro Cuadrado [Square Meter] (2005) at the Casas-Riegner gallery in Bogotá.