In an interview he gave in 1978, Luis Caballero discusses the role of the critic and the evolution of the visual arts in Latin America; gives his opinion on what art means; and reflects on his own work as well as on his influences. Caballero also outlines his own very personal poetics, explaining that “eroticism, art, and religion are all part of one single quest for pleasure and unity.” All three of these elements were part of his work throughout his entire career. Caballero considered himself to be a “painter of set ideas” who pursued “an increasingly realistic form of figuration.” He was obsessed with the human body as a subject. He believed that any emotion or feeling could be expressed through an image of the human form.

In July 1978, Eco [Echo] magazine (1960–82) published an interview with Luis Caballero (1943–1995), just as he was preparing a number of solo shows to be presented in Switzerland, Peru (Lima), and Colombia (Bogotá). In the 1970s, Caballero was already among the most prominent artists in recent Colombian history. He started his art career in 1966 and went on to show his work in a number of different countries. In 1968 he received an important award, winning the first prize at the I Bienal Iberoamericana de Pintura de Coltejer [First Iberian-American Coltejer Painting Biennial] in Medellín. He was twenty-five years old.

In the interview, Caballero discusses fundamental issues generally concerning art in Latin America and art criticism, both of which had become so sophisticated and steeped in an excess of artistic culture that they had lost the power to respond to a naïve, direct language. After the heyday of avant-garde painting in Colombia, Caballero adopted a more classical view of the artist’s function. In his opinion, the avant-garde art produced by his contemporaries had lost its way and had morphed into a “simple intellectual game” in which a different set of values was more highly prized than visual art projects or visions; “the artist is the poet, not the grammarian” he said, criticizing his avant-garde peers. Caballero was more interested in the pathetic or moving aspect of art (in the sense of its ability to violently disrupt a mood); he decided that the human figure was the ideal medium through which to achieve that kind of sentimental and emotional transmission. He also claimed that Latin America had yet to develop in terms of the visual arts, because the artists of the Southern Cone had yet to find themselves. In his opinion, they had stagnated as heteronymous imitators of Parisian and New York trends. Caballero thinks that “Latin American painting does not yet exist;” “you can’t talk about a form of Latin American painting that has its own individual traits;” and “Latin America’s individual traits (…) should beget a new form of seeing (…). Once that unique vision of the world has been expressed in pictorial form, then we can begin to talk about a ‘Latin American form of painting.’”