ABEL RODRÍGUEZ( MOGAJE GUIHU)
Abel Rodríguez( Mogaje Guihu)( b. 1941, La Chorrera, Colombia; d. 2025, Bogotá, Colombia), a knowledge keeper of the Nonuya people, was also perhaps the finest visual interpreter of the Colombian Amazon’ s living memory. Transformed into a sensitive cartography, his wisdom— unintentionally, but with infinite patience and aesthetic precision— translated the ancestral knowledge of the Amazon into a deeply moving visual language accessible to the wider contemporary world. Unlike the Western scientific gaze, which dissects, classifies, and isolates, Rodríguez’ s perception is guided by interconnection. Each plant, river, maloka( longhouse), or animal in his drawings appears in relation to the others, weaving a web of life that heaves with spiritual unity.
“ Don Abel,” as he was affectionately known, arrived in Bogotá in the early 1990s, having been displaced by violence in his native territory. There, he began to produce drawings that revealed his vast ancestral knowledge of the forest. One of his most emblematic works, El árbol de la vida y la abundancia( The tree of life and abundance)( 2023), conjures Amazonian myths and worldviews that tell of the interconnectedness of earth and sky. The painting’ s symbolic power lies in its capacity to be appreciated as a living being whose branching paths tap vast oral, botanical, and spiritual reserves of forest knowledge. Rodríguez’ s legacy is a call to contemporary art to renew itself— to stop looking at nature as an object and to start viewing it as a sacred subject.( MARÍA WILLS)
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