The Frost Art Museum Presents La Guerra que no hemos visto (The War We Have Not Seen)

The 17 paintings included in this exhibition were created in workshops by men and women who participated in the Colombian war. They belonged to paramilitary groups, guerrilla movements or the National Army of Colombia.
Over a period of two years, the former combatants painted their personal experiences during the war, illustrating the rural tragedy, witnessing the involvement of drug traffickers, capturing the painful repertoire of violence in Colombia, which for years has played out alongside daily life, blending in with normality. Their works are a painful documentation of violent episodes in Colombia, which for many years, intersected with normal everyday life. The workshops, were created at the request of Juan Manuel Echavarría, aim to weaken the social constructs of silence, rhetoric and indifference.
The participants’ lack of professional training allowed for the random use of visual codes to symbolize not only what was meant, but also, what was said. The naiveté of the language, and the friction between form and content, made the tragedy far more apparent. The paintings also raise questions as to the limitation of the word when conjugating truth. The exhibition, curated by Ana Tiscornia, was therefore built around the absence of words, to emphasize the void, and make it the subject of debate.
Juan Manuel Echavarría was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1947. He resides in Bogotá. Before becoming an artist, he published two novels, La gran catarata (Bogotá: Editorial Arco, 1981) and Moros en la costa (Bogotá: Ancora Editores, 1991). As of 2009, Echavarría has presented twenty solo exhibitions and participated in well over a hundred group exhibitions, screenings and film festivals.
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