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Cartagena de Indias POST-COLUMBIAN Colombian art mainly amounted to pale imitation of European styles until about the middle of this century. Then the nation's artists stopped imitating anybody, including each other, according to a compact exhibition of contemporary Colombian artists at the Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center. Curator Felix Angel, after searching in vain for a common theme for the show, has made a virtue of necessity by declaring that what these 10 Colombian artists have in common is that they have virtually nothing in common but talent and independence."Of all the nations of Latin America, Colombia is most like Spain," he says. "It's made up of geographically separate regions that are culturally and artistically distinct as well. So we decided simply to hang key works from four Colombian masters' breakaway periods, along with traditional works by six artists of the previous generation that show what they broke away from." In a stroke so subtle as to be almost subliminal, Angel has tied the 27 disparate paintings and sculptures together by painting the gallery walls in pastel stripes echoing the vivid yellow and blue over red of the Colombian flag. The featured artists are Alejandro Obregon, (1920-1992), Enrique Grau and Edgar Negret, both also born in 1920, and Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar, born in 1923. Obregon is sort of an honorary Colombian artist; he was born in Spain and spent only part of his childhood in Colombia. But the single year (1948) that he served as director of Bogota's School of Fine Arts had such a widespread and lasting effect on Colombian art that he is given pride of place among his native contemporaries. The centerpiece of the show is "Triptico de Cartagena de Indias," which Grau began working on in 1991 and finished last year; it's being exhibited for the first time. The apparently surrealistic triptych in fact depicts historical events. The left panel shows roses cascading over the city from an early biplane; in fact Grau's aunt, known as Tulipan, who was Colombia's first national beauty queen, also was aboard the first airplane to fly over Cartagena, and took with her baskets of the cut flowers for which Colombia is famous to scatter over the city. The center panel shows a parachuteless pilot jumping from his burning plane above the city, Colombia's first air fatality. His cartwheeling body constantly draws the eye away from the lovingly rendered cityscape into which he is plunging. The right panel shows the bullfighter known as El Pinturero, an uncle of Grau's,
whose specialty was to parachute into the city's seaside bullring before each
corrida. But one evening a strong offshore breeze carried him away over the
Caribbean, never to be seen again.
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