Landscape Memory – Jaime Tarazona
Memory has become a fundamental issue in Colombia in the last twenty years, in part because it is not possible to elaborate the past from history alone. The first to reflect on this issue was the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who defined in “The social frameworks of memory” (1925) that the concrete, the lived, the sacred and the magical were situated on the side of memory, while on the side of history was the totalizing story. Almost sixty years later, in 1984, Pierre Nora stated that “an object, from the most material and concrete to the most abstract and intellectually constructed, becomes a place of memory when it escapes oblivion, (…) for example when a community covers it with its affection and its emotions.” In this sense, Paul Ricoeur argued in “La memoria, la historia, el olvido” (2000) that history and memory are two forms of representation of the past where history aspires to truthfulness while memory aims for fidelity.
Jaime Tarazona belongs to the generation of contemporary Colombian artists who have been working through research since the late 1990s, and in his case, with a deep interest in painting and landscape. According to Tarazona, regarding this genre of representation of nature, the horizon: “is undoubtedly a sign that is part of our collective memory. In it, mental associations are established that start from the common observation process, warning us about a spectrum of color and landscape memories latent in us. The body of work that makes up the Memoria Apaisada project is the result of plastic research, the objective of which is to point out concepts rooted in the visual structure of the landscape we share. “From the use of horizontal lines and stripes on a two-dimensional plane, to delve into the symbolic and aesthetic definitions of the landscape, which visually awaken in us the evocation we have of it.”
The art market established the need for reproduction, even before the development of printing writing. For this, the pictorial images were synthesized and decomposed into elements that were susceptible to reproduction, a copy that dispensed with the direct intervention of the artist. The lines became patterns that simulated tones, textures and shapes that were engraved in wood or metal to be reproduced on paper. Then would come photography that, imitating memory, leaves a perennial record whose trace is made up of tiny silver grains that constitute another type of plot that can become a line when it records the movement of the object. Tarazona returns to these media in his work, with the help of geometry he dissects light from the landscape, from the horizon, to understand it as a spectrum that is translated into colors and that evades the verticality that symbolizes rigidity.
In his research “Ricardo Gómez Campuzano. Visions of Nationalism in Colombian Art” (2014), Claudia Cristancho writes about the landscape in the generation of the centenary of independence: “Landscape painting represented the first attempt to make a national and modern art, in which artists could allow certain chromatic and compositional freedoms.” Santander was also fundamental in the transition towards modern Colombian art. Regarding this importance in modernity and nationalism, Carlos Granés states in Delirio Americano (2022) about the beginning of muralism in Colombia: “Los Bachués, who were almost all sculptors, were joined by Luis Alberto Acuña, a painter of rotund volumes, similar to those of the Mexican school, which would be the first to make the leap to the walls, more specifically to the walls of the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Bucaramanga.” The importance of our artists is overwhelming for Marta Trab, who declared in 1983 that “the most important artist in Colombia in the 1970s is Beatriz González”, whose sixtieth anniversary of “Vermeer’s Lacemaker” will be commemorated in 2024. , his first individual painting exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá. In this same sense it can be said that Santander’s role in national art continues. It was no coincidence that in February 2021 the two most important galleries in the capital had exhibitions by Beatriz Gonzalez and Jaime Tarazona at the same time. Memoria Paisada reconciles us with the beauty and with the regional artistic legacy that is still being written, for the fortune of all.
Credits
Curatorship: Alberto Borja
Museography: John Jairo Orozco
Mounting: EMA / IMCT Mediation and Assembly School
Project: Carlos F. Rueda A.
