mind, even though it can’ t be understood in a conscious way, though there is no way of fully understanding it.
Miguel Ángel Rojas( Bogotá, 1946) is the author of this piece, which is made up of six natural size photographs of a young soldier of the Colombian army naked over a piece of ivory, mimicking the position of Michelangelo’ s David. The image is disturbing because the man lost his left leg to a landmine. The word“ quiebramales”( harmbreaker) is written down in the floor with pieces of pencil. The strange thing about this game of mirrors is that, in order to get close to its possible meanings one has to make a long detour, even if the photographs seem to explain themselves, and probably do so.
We talk about the perfect image, one that keeps the capacity of surprise in the spectator, because it is slippery as it is attractive. This David speaks of the beauty destroyed by war, of a country’ s disability to move incomplete. Rojas expresses the violence by abusing one of the icons from Western art; he outlines the anti-Renaissance of a society that has fallen unto important degrees of madness because of war. His work shows us violence in an insolent way, through a soldier of the army, naked and amputated, but neutralizes his audacity by turning the image in a sculpture that can be admired, but is incomplete.
Rojas is that kind of photographer and many more, forcing photography to do something that it is not used to: work as a text. He actually makes some of his pieces with small circular photographic fragments that organize to form phrases, references to art history or real characters, always with a touch of poison. It’ s no coincidence: we talk of an artist from the rebellion, a marginal – sometimes autobiographic – that redefines national identities and its contradictions.
There is an underlying sense of ethic in Roja’ s work, and also a game of social oppositions – unsolvable, actually – that define a great deal of the dynamics experienced by Colombia for the last 30 years. Rojas generates the unpleasant in a way that he questions the spectator’ s comfort by giving him the active role that any interpreter deserves. www. LivingArtRoom. com 73