The writer and critic Clemente Airó wrote an article about Carlos Correa in issue number twenty-six of Espiral [Spiral] magazine (1944–75), which the former edited. The article was a tribute to Correa on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of his work at the Galerías de Arte in Cali in 1949. The exhibition “represents twenty-five years of painting.” Airó identifies positive values in Correa’s work, referring to his circumstantial inspiration, his “moody expressions of reality,” his “innate, earthy feelings,” his creation of “atmosphere,” and his “mystical transcendence.” This analysis of Correa’s work is complemented by the theoretical underpinning of the critic’s own intuition and the opinions of other foreign art theoreticians of international renown. Airó concludes that Correa’s work is not a “linear [form of] painting,” but that it is “pictorial.” That is, his work offers “a deeper and more direct understanding of undefined American realities.”

In this review, the critic Clemente Airó (1918–1975) discusses the work of Carlos Correa (1912–1985). It was significant that this review appeared in Espiral [Spiral] in 1949 because during the 1940s that magazine was a key player in the development of modern literary and art criticism in Colombia. This new style of criticism had only recently moved beyond the biographical or anecdotal reviews of the nineteenth century and evolved to take what was (for that period) a theoretical and analytical approach that was in step with contemporary aesthetic studies; that is, criticism of a more scientific nature that was on a level with what was being produced by intellectuals and academics in the international art field. Therefore, local critical opinion—that was then in full bloom—began to take the form of objective views expressed in cultural magazines, which were among the most transcendental media in terms of forming and circulating attitudes to Colombian art. Although Airó’s criticism is still quite rhetorical (even prescriptive), he is considered to have had a significant influence on the field of art criticism in Colombia. His magazine Espiral was perhaps the first serialized publication in the country to specialize in discussions about the visual arts, though it may have seemed archaic when compared to modern criticism in international art circles.      

In this particular review of Carlos Correa’s work, it is interesting to note how Airó evoked the movements that had influenced the Latin American visual arts, especially in terms of their transcontinental peers and predecessors. By the 1940s, Colombian criticism was split between two diametrically opposed views: one (an extremely conservative position, which claimed that Latin American art had no future and dismissed it out of hand) considered art to be an essential expression of European culture. The other, extremely liberal position, championed “Americanist art” above everything else, without acknowledging the obvious influence of European art on the art forms that were emerging in the new world. Airó described Correa’s work as “telluric,” an adjective that was in vogue at the time and was used to associate the idea of “America” with a virginal natural world, an earth mother. According to Airó, Correa’s work embodies a far deeper understanding of American reality, thus reaffirming the social role of art.