El gesto desnudo: Guillermo Vélez

Here is a series of strokes that draw the gesture of an astonishing figure. Guillermo Vélez Mejía belonged to an unnamed generation of artists from the second half of the 20th century in Colombia. He traveled through picturesque cities: Manizales, Cali, New York, Lisbon, Armenia. He sought a unique aesthetic that would evoke the pleasure of living in a thousand ways and finding imaginary solutions to the challenges of reason, because perhaps reality and logic were not enough for him. He ventured into a new plastic and poetic dimension where he found a place among Alfred Jarry, César Vallejo, Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro, and other multidimensional characters whom he gave faces and sonorous names in his paintings. He was a rebel with a cause, he taught political prisoners to read and write, screen-printed horoscopes, traveled through communist countries, resisted as a migrant in the United States and Europe, and returned to his homeland with that sum of experiences transformed into a pataphysical painter. The naked gesture. Guillermo Vélez by Catherine Rendón brings together a plastic work and a life that will inspire in anyone an unyielding artistic vocation.