This is an essay by Luis Hernando Giraldo that was published in the catalogue for La sensación del tiempo humano. Homenaje a Giorgione, the exhibition presented in March 1999 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá. Giraldo mentions anecdotes and influences that shed some light on the symbols he includes in his works, and help to illuminate his use of particular elements, such as a fountain, an image of a city in the distance, a lamb, and “the solitary ones.” He also talks about how he relates to art through poetry, painting, and music, referring to the latter to make this comparison: “In painting, as in music, you look for the highest note, the sweetest, most vigorous, most sustained sound.” Giraldo ends his essay by discussing his individual approach to the act of painting. 

This essay is important because it captures the artist’s voice and expresses the dialogue that the Colombian painter Luis Hernando Giraldo (b. 1946) seeks to establish with his interviewer in order to convey his inner world through the images he produces. Just as the words in poetry convey images that give form to the poem, the artist’s line in a painting transports the viewer to certain places: to the landscapes in the Caldas region located between the towns of Salamina and Pácora, to childhood memories and the recollection of feelings produced by his grandmother’s words when she urged him to “look at the flowers in the church” or to “listen to the choir”. Giraldo explores those feelings and rediscovers the world in the universal themes that are at the heart of his work.     

Giraldo’s paintings also echo different stages in the history of art, evoking cave art with drawings that recreate the primitive world; Italian painting with his reinterpretation of landscapes and his painstaking studies of the human form; the Romantic period through the implicit magic of his images steeped in poetry; and finally, the masters of twentieth-century art, Pablo Picasso (1881−1973) and Andy Warhol (1928−87) through the ideas they explored, such as fragmented images, color, and traditional subjects.    

In his thirty-plus-year career, Giraldo has created atemporal images that blend abstract and figurative styles and reveal the importance of his process: “Any line has the same value as the most elaborate drawing. It contains everything, I can’t make a distinction between my final work and my sketches. That is why drawings come from color studies. You can’t deny that everything you do has the same value. Every brush stroke is the result of a lifetime immersed in art.”   

For more information on Giraldo’s work, see [doc. no. 1133381].