In this article, published in the Vida Cultural-Exposiciones [Cultural Life – Exhibitions] section of the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo, the caricaturist and critic Jorge Moreno Clavijo reviews the exhibition of Álvaro Herrán’s “informalist paintings.” Moreno Clavijo coins the term “informalism” to indicate that the surfaces of the paintings are covered with a thick layer of various elements, such as sand and pieces of fabric, that create a sense of “terrestrial bark” or “dissected mountain.” He is intrigued by the skepticism that such paintings arouse among the members of the viewing public: “nobody understands anything about what they see in the dark tones of those huge paintings.” The author of the article goes on to say that the purpose of “informalism” is to allow viewers to discover their own state of mind in the painting they are looking at. In short, the avant-garde in the field of painting, including Herrán, consists of “groups of informalists” that loudly advocate: “Death to the old procedures!”

This article by Jorge Moreno Clavijo (b. 1921) is significant. It introduces the first solo exhibition (1961) of works by the Colombian artist Álvaro Herrán (1937−1997), who was 24 years old at the time, at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País [Economic Society of Friends of the Country]. The critic remarks on how, in 1961, informalism was introduced at the Galería Buchholz through events like this one and the exhibition of works by the Spanish artist Ángel Luque, who lived in Caracas. Luque was a member of a group of artists who used textures to create thick surfaces on their canvases; he was influenced by Antoni Tàpies (b. 1923), the Catalan painter. In her famous essay “La resistencia” [The Resistance] (1973), Marta Traba recalled that in the 1950s and 1960s there was an informalist trend in Latin American Abstract painting that used a thick impasto style, and Luque is one of the painters she mentions. Traba, however, criticized a certain “informalist tampering” in the works of some Latin American artists whereas, in her opinion, Tàpies produced “enormously imaginative” works [Traba, Marta. Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950-1970 [Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Visual Arts] (Bogotá: Sigloveintiuno, 2005)].         

In 1966 Marta Traba (1923−1983) classified Herrán as “the first informalist”; the first to dare to combine thick impasto with sack cloth, ropes, and synthetic materials, as well as being a pioneer in creating murals with metal tubes.

The draftsman Jorge Moreno Clavijo studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes [School of Fine Arts] in Bogotá. In the late 1930s he began to contribute caricatures and articles to the newspapers. From 1959 to 1964 he wrote an art criticism column for the cultural section of El Tiempo newspaper. The newspaper would usually publish one of his caricatures with his column.