RECORD OF A UNIQUE YEAR IN THE DRAWINGS OF SUÁREZ LONDOÑO
By Álvaro de Benito
Bernal Espacio presents, in collaboration with the Albarrán Bourdais gallery, Drawings from the Year 2020, a solo exhibition that encompasses an interesting body of work, bounded in time, by José Antonio Suárez Londoño (Medellín, Colombia, 1955), one of the great figures of contemporary drawing. The series on display represents a visual record of the pre-pandemic and pandemic era, serving as a testimony to the uncertainty and isolation that surrounded and shaped the complexity of that period.
Suárez Londoño worked on these drawings from an occupational perspective, channeling through his daily works the acclimatization and adaptation to a new reality that was gradually unfolding. The starting point of the series arose from a list of phrases requested from his students before the start of 2020, which would serve as the basis for the daily rendering of an idea.
The artist has consistently maintained a strong connection between narrative and ideas, drawing and literature, exploring, as on this occasion, the periodic possibilities offered by the production process. The written word can be perceived as the genesis of the depicted motifs, but it also defines the space in which they develop.
Unaware of the historical magnitude that the year would hold—something the initial elements could not anticipate—the Colombian artist begins to express the creative and emotional restrictions that inhabit many of his works. Empty landscapes, escapism, spaces of death, and the reversal of daily rhythms appear in this collection of visual stories that function as a record. The idea of the diary, though not in an orthodox sense, underlies the chronology and semantic description of the drawings in which the word is translated.
This compilation of events is often brought to life with characters, animals, and plants that suffer from an undefined organicism, intertwining the human with its environment—a space that has undergone a drastic transformation. Behind an apparent simplicity, his drawings reflect the complexity of successive life experiences within a dystopian chronology.
José Antonio Suárez Londoño: Drawings from the Year 2020, organized by Espacio Bernal, can be seen until October 11 at the exhibition hall of the Albarrán Bourdais gallery, Barquillo 13, Madrid (Spain).
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