Luis Roldán

“Gone, Here, the title that Luis Fernando Roldán (Colombia, 1955) has chosen for his recent paintings and sculptures exhibition summarizes, as through a ‘Nadaist-like’ lightning, the history of Western representation: there where an absent occurred -gone-, a new presence is produced by art -here. Artists and art thinkers have addressed this issue since antiquity. Two millennials ago, Plinius recalled the anecdote about the origin of painting: the daughter of the potter Butades, seeing her lover about to leave her, traced his shadow’s profile on a wall. The story continues as the potter would add relief to it, inventing sculpture. Gone, Here, Roldán’s show, beautifully declines these foundational narratives: a painter, whose production in abstraction has spanned for the last 40 years, Roldán is also a potter, a sculptor whose interest for the plasticity of matter has recently blossomed in a series of ambiguous, zoomorphic, baroque-like ceramics. His paintings, abstract, landscape-like gestural compositions, made of masterfully colored fields and tangled tracings resonate vis-à-vis a long tradition of painting in Colombia characterized by the richness of surfaces and the ambiguity of forms, from the seminal artists Andrés de Santa María to Judith Márquez, Juan Antonio Roda and Manuel Hernández. Roldán’s transformative contribution to this history manifests here in the dialogue between paintings and ceramics, where the pictorial eloquence translates into a repertoire of zoomorphic objects, nameless things of beauty coming out from the fluid denseness of the paintings.”

—Luis Pérez-Oramas

Gone, Here, is Luis Roldan’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Luis Roldán (Cali, Colombia, 1955) studied art history at the École du Louvre (Paris), engraving at S.W. Hayter (Paris) and architecture at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). He has exhibited extensively at institutions internationally. A selection of solo shows includes: Periplo. Una retrospectiva 1986-2016, Banco de la República, Bogotá (2016); Expiación, Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá (2014); Presión y flujo, Galería Casas Reigner, Bogotá (2014); Umbra, Eidola, Mechanical Ventilation. Interactions with Willys de Castro and Other Voices, Henrique Faria, New York (2017, 2015, 2013 and 2011)

Transparencias, Museum of Modern Art, Medellín (2011); Continua, Sicardi Gallery, Houston (2007); Acerca de las estructuras, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, San José, Costa Rica (2006) and Permutantes, Sala Mendoza, Caracas (2005). Selected group shows include: 44th Salón Nacional de Artistas, Pereira (2016); the 1st Cartagena Biennial (2014); the 10th Monterrey Biennial (2012); the 53rd Venice Biennale, Latin America Pavilion (2009); and Dibujos, Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires (2004). He has won numerous awards such as the Luis Caballero Award (Bogotá, 2001) and the National Award in Visual Arts (Colombia, 1996). His work is included in important collections such as Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank Collection, New York; FEMSA Collection, Monterrey; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and the Museums of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Medellín. He lives and works both in New York City and Bogotá.