José Ignacio Roca reviews Cimientos [Foundations], a work by Miler Lagos, for the international magazine Art on Paper that focuses exclusively on works on paper. His first observation is that, in Lagos’ work, the materials contradict their intrinsic properties, Cimientos being a prime example. He then goes on to explain that Lagos created this work accidentally while he was working on some concrete sculptures that were based on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous war machines. The sculptures were to have been separated by a ream of paper that he would cut with a polisher. But when he did that he noticed that the ream of paper smelled like burning wood and took on the distinctive color of burned wood; the properties of the original material, however, were unchanged. For Cimientos, Lagos sculpted a 6-thousand-sheet ream in which each sheet bore the imprint of one of the artist Albrecht Dürer’s prints. The result looked like a tree trunk. In some cases the viewer can rip off sheets of paper as—according to Roca—“a gesture to democratize knowledge.” Lagos subsequently visited Dürer’s 16th century home, which is now a museum, in Nüremberg, where he discovered that, as part of the museum’s conservation tactics, the prints on display were reproductions, not originals. Inspired by that fact, Lagos let the wind scatter the sheets of paper from one of his trunks as a symbolic tribute to Dürer.          

This article was published in the international, bimonthly magazine Art on Paper, a publication that focuses on works on paper, mainly prints. For the November/December 2007 issue, the Colombian critic and curator José Ignacio Roca (b. 1962) was invited to write about an artist whose work was compatible with “The Fourth Annual New Prints Review”. At that time, Roca was the artistic director of the International Festival of the Philadelphia Print Triennial “Philagrafika.” He had previously been in charge of the Art Unit at the Banco de la República de Colombia for over a decade.   

The first time José Roca ever saw the work of Miler Lagos (b. 1973) was at the exhibition Still Life/Naturaleza Muerta (at the Luis Ángel Arango Library in 2003). Roca invited a group that included the artists Camilo Martínez, Ricardo León, Angélica Jaramillo, Angélica Rincón, and Miler Lagos to participate in an exhibition. In 2008, Roca curated the exhibition Nuevas Floras [New Flora] at the Galería Nara Roesler in Sao Paulo (Sorry: I can’t recall if we us Sao or São for São Paulo in English), by a group of artists whose work was all about nature, and Lagos was one of the group. Roca also invited him to take part in Philagrafika 2010 and the Valparaiso event, co-curated by Jorge Diez, that same year.  

In just a few years, Miler Lagos’ career has skyrocketed and he is now considered one of the most promising young artists in Colombia, with an undeniable international following. Among his works, Cimientos has attracted the most attention and critical reviews as a result of the contradiction between its form and reference (behind the solid form that looks like a tree trunk, there is an ephemeral work of great fragility). “It is as though this one’s spirit arose from its material,” Miler Lagos said during an interview with the Colombian newspaper El Nuevo Siglo.