With the text, “Cinco dibujantes” [Five Draftsmen], Eduardo Serrano Rueda, Colombian art critic and curator, presented the exhibition 5 dibujantes. Astudillo/Caballero/Guerrero/ Jaramillo/Truss. The show opened in October 1975 at the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] in Bogotá. Serrano believes that perceiving the drawing as an autonomous language or a creation unto itself is vital to an understanding of its great popularity in the 1970s. In his opinion, there were few Colombian artists at the time who were considered “exploradores del dibujo” [explorers of the drawing], since many refused to break with the academic vision that defined “the correct way of drawing.”

Eduardo Serrano Rueda (born 1939), the Colombian art critic and curator, included this text in a book published by the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, Un Lustro Visual: Ensayos sobre arte contemporáneo colombiano (1976) [Five Years in the Visual Arts; Essays on Contemporary Colombian Art]. This work is basic to the analysis of the visual arts in Colombia in the first half of the 1970s. It was also published in the section Lecturas Dominicales [Sunday Readings] in El Tiempo (October 19, 1975, p. 3), the daily newspaper with the highest circulation in Colombia. In the 1970s, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá (which opened to the public in 1963) contributed to the recognition and dissemination of the drawing as artwork, placing a value on the autonomous nature of the medium as a primary [art] language. It achieved this effort through exhibitions such as Nombres nuevos en el arte de Colombia [New Names in Colombian Art] (1972); Barranquilla, Cali y Medellín [Barranquilla, Cali, and Medellín] (1974); 5 dibujantes (1975); and Papel y Lápiz [Paper and Pencil] (1976). As curator of these shows, Serrano Rueda presented arguments to validate the drawing as a final work in the catalogue’s texts. In Serrano’s opinion, Ever Astudillo (born 1948), Luis Caballero (1943–1995), Alfredo Guerrero (born 1936), Óscar Jaramillo (born 1947) and the New Yorker based in Bogotá, Ned Truss (born 1939), were the five explorers brought together by the show. Each of them had “a personal, valid, language: easily identifiable and completely recognizable in the sphere of Colombian art.” To Serrano, most of the approaches in the exhibition 5 dibujantes were “stylistically committed to realism.” The writer believes that this work was derived from photography in its “intent to witness a social context and a specific time and place.” He perceives that realistic nature in the draftsmen who base their drawings on photographs as well as in works that can be understood by reference to the framing and planes that emerge from the experience of [using] the camera. With the exhibition 5 dibujantes, Serranocontinued along the same lines as in Barranquilla, Cali y Medellín; that is, he kept on promoting exhibitions in Bogotá of work done by young artists from the region.