CARLOS JACANAMIJOY CANTOS DE LA MEMORIA, MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY Oslo Norway

CARLOS JACANAMIJOY

M U S E U M O F C U LT U R A L H I S T O R Y Oslo Norway

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CARLOS JACANAMIJOY EXHIBITION “SONGS OF MEMORY”

M U S E U M O F C U LT U R A L H I S T O R Y Oslo Norway

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Republic of Colombia Ministry of Foreign Affairs Minister of Foreign Affairs Claudia Blum Vice-minister for Multilateral Affairs Adriana Mejía Hernández Ambassador of Colombia to the Kingdom of Norway Ángela Montoya Holguín Director of Cultural Affairs Tatiana García Correa

Special thanks to: Carlos Jacanamijoy Exhibition: “Songs of Memory” 2020 Museum of Cultural History, Oslo-Norway Museum Director Håkon Glørstad Director of the Exhibition and Audience Section Biljana Topalova-Casadiego Project Manager Benedicte Sunde Texts Ángel Kalenberg General Manager Zoraida Iguarán Photography Pages Cover, 15, 19, 21 by Tahuanty Jacanamijoy Pages 6, 7, 42 by Camilo Rozo Pages 38, 39 by Mauricio Vélez Pages 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 45 by Fabián Álzate

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Recovering my culture is not an attitude.

It’s a story we’re part of.

CARLOS JACANAMIJOY

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As Ambassador of Colombia to the Kingdom of Norway, I am truly overjoyed to witness and be part of the first exhibition of Carlos Jacanamijoy in the iconic Museum of Cultural History of Oslo, but more so to share the remarkable story of this indigenous Colombian plastic artist.

Through his work, “Jaca” illustrates his memories, the fantasies of the jungle, his roots and more importantly his cultural intersection as a Colombian indigenous man, which are captured with mystical colours, shapes and forms in every painting.

Jacanamijoy, a child born next to the fire, who drew on old sheets with charcoal from his grandmother’s stove and dreamt of becoming Michelangelo, offers us today the precious gift of feeling of perceiving colour innocently and purely through his work.

Colombia is a country with infinite cultural, creative and historical wealth, that has been and still is preserved and cherished through art. As Jacanamijoy said, “the arts can transform society, unconsciously and intangibly, and it is the artist job to disseminate transformation through his work”.

This exhibition for me is the recognition of Colombian art, Colombian artists, our ancestors and above all our indigenous peoples who continue to safeguard the Earth.

It is truly priceless to have the full support and disposition of Mr. Håkon Glørstad, Benedicte Sunde and their wonderful team at the Museum, who believed in Colombia, who believed in Mr. Jacanamijoy and opened this iconic institution for Norwegians and to people from all around the world to see a glimpse of what Colombia and Colombian talent has to offer. Ángela Montoya Holguín

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Songs of memory Oil on canvas 76 x 100 cm 2019

Songs of memory A tribute to ancient shamanic songs

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To the rhythm of the water Acrylic on canvas 184cm x 10mt 2018

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To the rhythm of the water After making the big backdrop “Of interior nature�

(512x702 cm. 2018), in coloured acrylic paint and raw canvas without imprimatur, I wanted to continue with the same rhythm that I had experienced there on this canvas, 10 meters long by 184 cm in height. This time also in acrylic but only black, staining the fabric with the prints left by the water and the black acrylic, with

drawings and paint, on the cloth soaked by water buckets. The water and non-intervened fabric create the lighting. It is a painting made to the rhythm of the behaviour of the water on the canvas, and at the same time, because of its horizontal format, like traversing a riverbed.

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Paths of light Oil on canvas 170x200 cm 2020

A primeval world Faced with Carlos Jacanamijoy’s paintings, spectators feel driven to project stellar explosions, expanding distant planets, enchanted places, radiant gardens lit by incandescent suns, fantastic flowers, gushing fountains, pure colors overflowing forms,and elusive strokes.

However, according to Aldous Huxley’s hypothesis in The Doors of Perception, the brain blocks this primeval world though the intellect, in order to disconnect us from that cosmic totality and allow us to survive in our limited everyday universe.

Because they have remained unchanged since the Upper Paleolithic, certain beliefs and experiences that characterize the religions and cosmologies of both the Far East and southern America have become current objects of research for the cognitive sciences.

Jacanamijoy professes a deep faith in the secrets of that ungraspable cosmos and his painting attests to those beliefs and experiences.

(Jacanamijoy: A Painter between Two Worlds, Ă ngel Kalenberg)

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An insignificant plate of rice Oil on canvas 200x129x3,4 cm 2008 – 2013

An insignificant plate of rice The spikes, stems, grains and leaves of corn, basic in the diet of the indigenous, dominate the pictorial space and contrast with the smallness of the plate of rice, the fundamental food of Colombians that the painter could only taste when he was already a grown child.

The work illustrates the kind of intimate evocation he draws from his memories.

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Breaking with boundaries Jacanamijoy’s canvases often tend to monumentality, to the protagonism of scale, by virtue of which spectators situated at the usual distance cannot encompass them in a measurable evaluation, given that the length and the width are larger than the whole image that can be grasped by the eye. Moreover, spectators also lose the sense of boundaries and find themselves immersed, subsumed into the picture.

In this sense, Jacanamijoy continues along the path opened up by Monet’s Water Lilies.

Painted on enormous canvases —at the beginning of the 20th century— they cannot be grasped in a focalized manner in a single gaze. Spectators do not find in them the support of the usual references kept by the Impressionists, which are still implicitly bound to a spatiality inherited from the Renaissance.

Monet breaks with tradition by referring the view of the painting to a horizon located at the height of the spectators’ eyes, and to an extremely horizontal format, thus managing to make the boundaries between earth and sky disappear. In these canvases, the sky and the clouds seem to have descended, as

they are reflected in the water and can be glimpsed disruptively amidst the floating water lilies.

In both Monet’s and Jacanamijoy’s paintings, ground and figure acquire an unstable status. Moreover, the spatiality of their paintings devours the spectators, including them, and, in this sense, they coincide with contemporary science, which includes the observer in the observed.

Without this plastic revolution, the line of contemporary pictorial explorations initiated by American Jackson Pollock, which nurtures the work of Carlos Jacanamijoy, would have been impossible. In the case of Pollock’s audacious plastic proposal, especially during his totemic period, the ritual Navajo sand paintings of the southwestern United States exerted a decisive influence. Jacanamijoy will extend and develop that trend on the basis of his Inga ancestry.

(Jacanamijoy: A Painter between Two Worlds, Ángel Kalenberg)

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Lights in the mountain Ă“leo sobre tela 115x165.2x3.2 cm 2018

Light in the mountain As a child, sometimes very lonely, I sat and waited in the evenings at my house. Looking in the distance at the mountain. Hoping that those car lights on the dusty and rough road that grew bigger as they approached the village, would be from the car my travelling parents rode. Whom I missed so much for months or years. When the enlarged lights lit in the last road curve before the village, I jumped with joy. It

was a false alarm because the car passed through the village, and I sadly saw as those lights were turning in the distance as small as when I had seen them appear.

That sometimes became a routine, however, when I had already lost all hope that my parents would arrive, those warm yellow lights would come and dazzle me in my face, and I with my little brothers would run to hug my parents.

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Impetus of light and seed Oil on canvas 90 x 200 cm 2019

Radiance The unreality of the magnificent landscapes of Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón’s “white period” are a sort of platform to translate into plastic terms the devouring tropical light of the Caribbean coast of Macuto, which is very different from the Newtonian, Western light of the Impressionists. In that environment, when the midday sun beats down, nature’s forms fade, devoured by a white light. And, let us not forget, white light is the sum of beams of all the colors that the brain is in charge of decoding.

The luminosity obtained by Reverón is more earthly, like that of Gothic architecture, for example, and it harmonizes with Western mysticism. In the Venezuelan’s painting then, the object is at the mercy of atmospheric light and the spectator, free from it, contemplates it from the outside.

On the other hand, the luminosity of Jacanamijoy’s painting derives from the decomposition of white light into its diverse wavelengths, and this allows him to create a work with peculiar indigenous roots: spectators are now submerged within that motley world. They are not mere spectators of an event; rather, they are actors that participate in it.

(Jacanamijoy: A Painter between Two Worlds, Ángel Kalenberg)

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My garden Oil on canvas 170 x 200 cm 2020

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Paths of light Oil on canvas 78x68 cm 2020

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Intersection Oil on canvas 250 x 510 cm 2016

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The mirror reflects your other self Anonymous Suddenly, you don’t see what others think you see.

Or perhaps, what happens is that some do not see what others are used to or intend to see for us. Others believe, in turn, that some have become accustomed, too, to seeing themselves through the eyes of others.

So it turns out, then, that there are different ways of seeing when it comes to wanting to try to understand one and the other and to understand in the long run that we are one.

Intersection is a metaphor for what we are as human beings. Each of us is an intersection in the most palpable sense, as we are all one and there is no purity of race or culture. My experience of a cultural and biological intersection has been a vital swing between what is of other people’s (or others’) and

mine. As long as I can remember, I have lived at the intersection of two or more worlds, crossing cultural and dialectic thresholds. I grew up speaking Quechua with the few remaining speakers in Colombia, for ¬reasons of origin and resistance and speaking Spanish for reasons of survival and adaptation. Words, as painting, have their power. In these paintings, I want to share my experience of intersection humanizing the act of painting, which I have conceived as a selfabsorbed immersion or attempt to understand myself.

I did it in the spirit of fuelling the desire to paint, congenital in all, which in children manifests very clearly. That childish innocence, that paints, endows everything with sensuality, including today’s galloping dehumanization. In the most intimate state, the act of painting is an act of love.

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Night cry Oil on canvas 167 x 200 cm 2008

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The air and the hours Jacanamijoy painted a series of pictures whose titles refer to the different times of day.

But far from inscribing himself in the line started by French painter Claude Monet, Jacanamijoy avoids evoking the sensuality of external, momentary visual effects in order to configure what could be defined as the world of inwardness, as the different emotional hours, the diverse moods of the artist, which, in turn, reflect cosmic development. Thus, he distances himself from the natural world and makes the painter’s subjectivity prevail.

The shamanic imaginary makes use of polarity as a symbolic mechanism, the same one that can be found in ritual tables; “sun and moon, opposing yet complementary forces”, as some have said. The Colombian’s paintings are tinged, alternately, by

sunlight and moonlight (the names of several of his pictures attest to this: Árbol de sol (Sun Tree), Sol de páramo (Páramo Sun), Luna y puerta (Moon and Door), El pico y la luna (Beak and Moon), and bring to mind Tamayo’s notable Perro ladrando a la luna (Dog Barking at the Moon), a painting that features a thematic air of cosmic mystery.

André Breton, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso were also attracted to stellar maps. Unlike them, Jacanamijoy sees them from “within”: in his paintings, the disappearance of the moon gives way to a cosmic astonishment that goes beyond poetry, in search of the unknown.

(Jacanamijoy: A Painter between Two Worlds, Ángel Kalenberg)

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Alterations of a fiction Oil on canvas 200 x 132 cm 2016

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Alterations of a fiction The colours of the voice of my grandmother “mama conchita� who was understood better when speaking in Quechua than in Spanish, was my connection with that way of thinking the world from other perspectives such as speaking naturally and easily with plants and animals. That universe that thanks to the stubbornness of the elders of my village, were transmitted to the new generations and that vision today calls for the attention of the world.

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Holes in the wind Oil on canvas 100 x 230 cm 2010

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Alterations of a fiction

Holes in the wind

The colours of the voice of my grandmother “mama conchita� who was understood better when speaking in Quechua than in Spanish, was my connection with that way of thinking the world from other perspectives such as speaking naturally and easily with plants and animals. That universe that thanks to the stubbornness of the elders of my village, were transmitted to the new generations and that vision today calls for the attention of the world.

This artwork is inspired by the encounter of Father Shaman with the Dalai Lama, an event that made the painter think they both healed by blowing through their mouths. Attentive to the lessons we can derive from cultures close to nature, Jaca resorted to a title with a figurative connotation, that is easy to visualize, to create the metaphor of a primaeval world view full of secrets and arcane that rationalist civilization does not reach to understand.

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Interior jubilation Oil on canvas 50 x 240 cm 2017

Indoor games Oil on canvas 50 x 240 cm 2017

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Interior jubilation The spirituality of jubilation of nature and inner universe.

Indoor games The spirituality of a landscape of interior nature.

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Not just for fun Oil on canvas 170x280 cm 1993

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Not just for fun Grandma’s wooden bench appears repeated three times. The unseen half of the first one refers to a remote past of unknown facts, which raises a story to be told.

The second one is the only one that can be fully seen and hangs in the form of a swing, a sign of a present known by the author of the painting. The unseen half of the third one points to the future that children and grandchildren must build by being born. Below, as in the painting on page 15, three turtles appear to parade. Evocations of the chilakuån or papayuelas to which the children put paws and heads, as if they were little animals to play with. Five ovoid root herbaceous plants seem to float and go to the central fringe of the composition, a detail mentioned in the title. These are the herbaceous plants that the six-year-old playful child liked to tear off and throw into the air. The evocation of the game indicates that the painter’s work is autobiographical and lyrically celebrates moments of his peasant past, as well expressed by the general treatment of the painting.

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The pitchfork Oil on canvas 140 x 170 cm 1994

The pitchfork Almost minimized, a fruit lowering rod stands out for its red colour. Fruits on top evoke the unattainable and distant. What we wish to possess or taste. One can speak of the “object of desire�, explains the painter.

The numinous nature, crossed by spirits, pulsates in the brush stroke and colour. At the centre, the pulp of the papayuela floats and in the lower-left corner we see, the transparent fruit peels with which the children play.

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Fotografo Mauricio Velez

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Auca Oil on canvas 260 x 360 cm 2013

Auca The central phallic motif is topped by a pair of horns; the motifs drawn on the surface indicate that the one on the left is celestial or spatial and the one on the right is aquatic. Between those horns are two jaguar fangs and two shamanic bells. Here is an Auca girded by a synthesized chumbe which is protected by a huaira sacha or cleansing branch of the wind tree, floating at the top of the canvas. And the eye representing the infinite force from which light points are shed that the spirit receives. The yellow light cataract refers to the knowledge poured out to heal the body, soul and earth. With the black cataract, the energy that combines the spiritual and the material is unfolded, after ascending to the sky to descend on the surface of the planet. In the lower strip, the combination of leaves evokes the vinรกn or restorative drink in which wild plants from the moorland, the mountain, the valley, the jungle, etc., are mixed to harmonise men physically and spiritually.

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CARLOS JACANAMIJOY TISOY Born in Santiago, Department of Putumayo, Colombia, 1964.

STUDIES 2012-14 1986-90 1989-90 1984-85 1983-84

Magister Cultural studies (Cum Laude Degree). Pontificia Javeriana University.

Master in Plastic Arts, National University of Colombia, Bogotá.

Philosophy and Literature, La Salle University, Bogotá, Colombia.

Fine Arts, Nariño University, Pasto, Colombia Fine Arts, La Sabana University, Bogotá, Colombia.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Exhibition “Dawn In Bloom”, Palacio de la Proclamación, Cartagena Bolivar.

2019 Exhibition “Holes in the Wind”, Museum Rayo, Roldanillo, Valle del Cauca, Colombia.

2018 Exhibition “Holes in the Wind”, foundry park, CONARTE, Monterrey, Mexico 2018 Exhibition “Interior Nature”, Alonso Garcés Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia.

2018 Exhibition “Holes in the wind”, Toluca Modern Art Museum, Mexico.

2017 Exhibition “Holes in the wind”, Library, Villavicencio, Colombia.

2016 Exhibition “Intersection”, Alonso Garcés Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia.

2015 Exhibition “The Chromatic Jungles of Carlos Jacanamijoy”, EPM Library, Medellin, Colombia 2015 Exhibition “Originaire” Gare de Marlon Galerie París.

2014 Exhibition “Carlos Jacanamijoy recent works” Sandra Higgins Fine Art, London.

2013 Retrospective, Magic, memory, colour, Museum of Modern Art Bogotá, Colombia.

2008 The other look, Latin American y Caribbean Studies Gallery, at Stony Brook University, New York, USA 2007 Off The Map, Smithsonian Institution, New York, USA 2006 Exhibition “El Rio”, Leon Tovar Gallery, New York, USA. 2004 Exhibition “The State of Things”. Casa de América. Madrid, Spain.

2003 “Pinturas” (Paintings). Fabien Fryns Galleries. Marbella, Spain.

“Como contar un sueño” (Like telling a dream). Palace of Nations. United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland.

2002 “Pinturas”. Colombian Embassy, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. 2001 “Putumayo”. La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art, Cali, Colombia.

1999 “Paths of water”. Great Hall of the People. Beijing, People´s Republic of China.

“Paths of water”. Exhibition Gallery of the Cultural Center, Hong Kong, People´s Republic of China.

1997 “What color is it?”. Paintings. Galería Garcés Velázquez, Bogotá.

“Pinturas”. Museum of Modern Art, Pereira, Colombia.

“Pinturas”. Chamber of Commerce, El Poblado, Medellín, Colombia.

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GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 “Awakenings”, Léopold Sedan Senghor Gallery, Colombian-French Alliance, Bucaramanga, Colombia.

2010 Vantage point: The contemporary Native Art Collection, Smithsonian, Washington, DC 1999 “First Prize Winners. Colombian National Salon of Artists, 1940-1998”, Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá, Colombia.

1998 37th Colombian National Salon of Artists, Bogotá.

1997 Regional Salon of Artists. Central Zone. Estación de la Sabana, Bogotá, Colombia.

“Contemporary Colombian Art in the Museum of Modern Art”. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel.

1996 35th Colombian National Salon of Artists, Corferias, Bogotá, Colombia.

1995 “Nuevos nombres: Imagen regional” (New Names: Regional image). Travelling Exhibition. Banco

de la República. Colombia.

22nd National Salon of Young Artists. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia.

7th Regional Salon. Museo Rayo. Roldanillo, Colombia.

1994 35th Colombian National Salon of Artists. Corferias, Bogotá, Colombia.

14th Arturo and Rebeca Rabinovich Salon. Museum of Modern Art, Medellín, Colombia.

6th Salon of Young Artists, Santafé de Bogotá. Galería Santafé, Planetario Distrital, Bogotá, Colombia.

1993 6th Regional Salon, Zone 5. Banco de la República, Pasto, Colombia.

AWARDS

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“Order of Democracy” in the grade of Gentleman Cross. House of Representatives of the Republic of Colombia.

“Colfuturo” scholarship for study abroad.

“Colcultura” (Colombian Institute of Culture) scholarship for individual creation in painting.

Honorable Mention. Regional Salon. Zone 5. Banco de la República, Pasto, Colombia.

Honorable Mention. 5th Fine Arts Show, La Sabana University, Bogotá.

COLLECTIONS Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. Luis Ángel Arango Library, Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia.

Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá, Colombia.

La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art, Cali, Colombia.

Museum of Art, Pereira, Colombia.

Museum of Art, National University of Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia.

Planetario Distrital, Bogotá, Colombia.

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS London, U.K. Hamburg, Germany Monaco, France Marbella, Spain, Madrid Washington, D.C., New York, Miami; United States Mexico City, Monterrey; Mexico Caracas, Venezuela

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