CARLOS JACANAMIJOY
Carlos Jacanamijoy( b. 1964, Santiago, Colombia) belongs to the Inga people, an Indigenous community which is part of the broader Quechua cultural grouping. His family lineage— the Jacanamijoy Tisoy clan— is deeply rooted in the Amazonian worldview, where nature, dreams, and spirituality are interwoven in an integral understanding of the world. Jacanamijoy’ s work embraces both the Andean and the Amazonian, an intersection of cultures that gives rise to sensitive, dreamlike, chromatic narratives around the relationship between the human and natural worlds.
Jacanamijoy’ s father was the Inga community’ s knowledge keeper and spiritual guide. He instilled in his son a vital connection with the environment and introduced him to the magic of plants such as yagé( ayahuasca). From these early foundations, Jacanamijoy’ s painting has drawn on rituals, mystical experiences, song, and music. He studied fine art in Bogotá, an encounter with Western perspectives which helped him forge a body of work that is at once authentic and keenly aware of the tensions present in contemporary art.
The work shown here, De naturaleza interior I( Of inner nature I)( 2018), is a chromatic array of diluted blues and greens, layered with stains and brushstrokes that hint at fragments of plants or flowers— recurring motifs in Jacanamijoy’ s work. For all its apparent abstraction, his pictorial language is in fact a manifestation of color and matter achieved through trancelike gestural handling. The result is a series of landscapes that are at once spiritual and sensual. Politically engaged, this is an aesthetic that leads us to question the colonial hierarchies of painting and to propose an epistemology of art firmly rooted in the forest.( MARÍA WILLS)
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