This article by critic and curator Germán Rubiano was published in the obituary section of the September 1988 issue of the magazine Arte en Colombia. In it, Rubiano bemoans the death of Álvaro Herazo at the age of forty-six on Tuesday, May 24 of that same year. The article provides a detailed account of the career of an artist who turned to a wide range of media, themes, and tendencies to conceive and develop his work. The text describes Herazo as an active researcher attuned into the latest tendencies in art, music, and architecture, all of which he applied to his artwork as well as to his work as a curator, critic, researcher, professor, and architect. Rubiano mentions repeatedly Herazo’s involvement in Conceptual art and the most experimental media of his time, such as performance in the eighties. He also emphasizes the importance of Herazo’s theoretical work as part of the Barranquilla-based Grupo 44, a group of artists from the Caribbean region of Colombia whose members included, Delfina Bernal, Eduardo Hernández, Fernando Cepeda, and Víctor Sánchez, in addition to Herazo. 

On the occasion of his death, this text discusses the impact that the artwork and broader professional life of Álvaro Herazo (1942-1988) had on the visual arts in Colombia as a whole and on the country’s Caribbean region in particular. The author recognizes not only Herazo’s artistic research from the early sixties until the time of his death, but also his work as a theorist and critic which was essential to understanding the notion of the contemporary artist who, in a seemingly schizophrenic manner, wanders through different media, theories, and practices.

While the article recognizes the varied and multiple nature of Herazo’s work, it does not attempt to use that approach as the basis for a solid artistic discourse. On the contrary, Rubiano envisions the aesthetic periods of Herazo’s career as stages separated by tendency or by technique. For instance, the author discusses Herazo’s conceptual work of the eighties and his watercolors with ecological themes of the seventies as two distinct phases. A reading of this sort—that is, one that divides the life of the artist according to the formal periods of his work—fails to grasp the plurality of Herazo’s discourse as a source of enrichment or an adaptation strategy. In fact, it reduces that plurality to incongruence and understands Herazo as a product of style, in a definition of “modern artist” still operative in Colombia in the eighties. Nonetheless, Herazo is redeemed from the modernist conception of the artist when reference is made to his text on the work Los Bañistas [The Bathers] (1987), a series of collages for urban space. In that work, Herazo displays an ability to adapt to a number of facets and referents as this series was produced using a technique more traditional than his previous work. 

In his experimental and conceptual work from the eighties, Álvaro Herazo worked in photography, video, as well as performance. The performances Proyecto para sellar el Mar [Project To Seal the Sea] (1981) and Reporter con Interferencias [Reporter with Interferences] (1982) were presented at the Sara Modiano alternative space in Barranquilla; Información es Poder [Information Is Power] (1984) took place at the first meeting of the Cultura Hispanoamericana in Bogotá. With these works, Herazo came to be considered a pioneer of the performance medium in Colombia.

For further information on this artist, see doc. no. 1131063.