Leo Matiz

To talk about Leo Matiz, who was once acclaimed as one of the top 10 photographers in the world, is almost like telling a fantastic tale woven in the mystical and tangled warps of an imagined, mythical place. But this is not the case, since Leo Matiz, born in 1917 in Aracataca, a place located in the department of Magdalena, Colombia, that was the inspiration for the mythical Macondo, was not otherworldly. On the contrary, although his life was a snippet of adventures that cross like threads in a magic carpet with a thousand and one stories to tell, his photographs are those of a tireless reality catcher. His work as a graphic reporter, correspondent to half the world, led him to witness multiple social and political events.

As the wise German professor Lichtenberg would say, “In our time, where insects talk about insects and butterflies collect butterflies”, his work, his legacy, reaches us through the dedicated work of his daughter Alejandra, who launched him towards national and international recognition.

Matiz, who passed away in 1968, is one of the few who were able to capture unique and unrepeatable events, fleeting, and thus eternal, with the sharp eye, with the wonder of those who see the world for the first time. His images become a web of events and things, even if we cannot distinguish at first sight what they are about. Their light traps us and seduces us, leaving us in the presence of unfathomable mysteries. What is moving is that he traps them in the network of the reality. Matiz is a photographer of high contrasts, perhaps because, being accustomed to the light of his native land, more than to the plateau of Bogota, he saw better this way and drew with his camera those perfect silhouettes that simulate shadows or graphics in the air, perfectly aligned in the contours of the circus trapezist or a cable that is being let down in a construction site, or of forms that appear in the core of some palpable reality, the simple and plain truth, the one the eye sees.