This magazine, published in 1950 by the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín (1937–2005), is one of the very few documents available on the artist Cecilia Porras (1920–1971). It might also be her first attempt to describe herself in writing and in public. At that time, despite her youth and the fact that her work differed so starkly from the conventional approach to landscape painting in Colombia, Porras had already caught the attention of the academic and intellectual critics in the country. In the eyes of those who were involved in discussions about local culture, the poetics expressed in this document was perfectly compatible with the abstract movement that was all the rage in Europe at the time and was already taking root in Colombia. In her essay, Porras takes an introspective look at herself, stressing her independence and the sincerity of her commitment to the visual arts, which transcended the influence of and contact with the works of other Colombian artists working in other styles. This, she claims, is her vocation, and she believes that life has so far distracted her from her artistic ambitions, which she is ready to pursue full time and completely by 1950.
At a time when Colombian artists of the twenties generation wanted to be free of the prevailing figurative mood, Cecilia Porras understood that her work found its greatest power when it went beyond objective facts and achieved subjective expression, when it could communicate “anxiety,” “internal struggle,” and “emotion”; and even more so when “feelings” and “ideas” began to play a part in the linguistic terrain of her own artistic plane. These were her artistic convictions when she left the city of Cartagena and enrolled in the Escuela de Bellas Artes [School of Fine Arts] in Bogotá in 1948. There, volatile young artists were seeking to express local concerns through the ideas that had been proffered by the European avant-garde since the turn of the century in what was to become the artistic ethos in the growing Colombian middle class. Faced with the twin environment in Bogotá (reception/assimilation, production/self-definition) Porras claims to have consolidated her position in terms of painting, in which she sees a remarkable social aspect since she cannot relegate herself to the margins of history: the new currents flowing through the arts are inextricably linked to the tensions of the period via a connection that is as inevitable as the “Bogotazo” itself.
This text is part of the collection of documents written by Cecilia Porras. For more information on this subject, see “¿Por qué pinto?” [doc. no. 1132532].