Miler Lagos

Bogota, Colombia, 1973

            Colombian artist Miler Lagos started his career at the end of the last century. His production is characterized by the eclecticism of his practices, which oscillate between photography, video installation, intervention in the public space, and sculpture. Nevertheless, whichever medium he uses, in each of his creations, the artist seeks unity of effect: the suspension of any certainty. The multidisciplinary point of view with which Lagos approaches his projects generates a final product displaying the intensive use of the abstraction of the spatial and temporal coordinates in which his work is inserted. In this sense, his way of observing the world exceeds the superficial to take up apparently ordinary elements, their historical, and cultural density.

            In one of his first projects, Columbas (1998), he draws a pre-Columbian figure called "tunjo" with bird food. As the pigeons descended, they would trace this silhouette, which disappeared as the food ran out. With this poetic exercise, the artist warns about the threats of that local past in the context of globalization. Along the same lines, the artist's production also seeks to expose the rigidity of historiographic discourses. In at least two of his artistic projects, Inmersos (2004-2008) and El Papel Aguanta Todo (2008), Lagos argues the heavy grammar of official narratives. He ironizes the public language of the monument, transforming statuary scenes of historical figures into laughable operations, deconstructing the heavy formats of the national pantheon, or making use of irony and paradox when he constructs a series of vertical sculptures made in the graphic materials of the printed media. 

            Indeed, the systematic crisis of that, which is presented to us as reality, marks Lagos' trajectory. His works show particular skills in introducing perceptual games. What appears to be balloons or balls are in fact pieces of concrete, steel, and rubber; what appears to be marble columns turns out to be cardboard and formica structures; what appears to be trees is revealed as paper. It is not surprising that his consistent and coherent production has recently adopted, in tune with his accumulated work, a growing concern for ecology and the way we inhabit the world.