Miguel Ángel Rojas
Bogotá, Colombia, 1946
"It is impossible to make art in paradise."
Interview for the Truth Commission website
At the age of nine, Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946) received a gift from his father: a book by Paul Cézanne. This gift encouraged him to discover, from a very early age, his vocation as an artist. Al first he briefly studied architecture, which he left to later begin studying art at the National University of Bogota. After his first experiences exhibiting his work, Rojas became aware that his work should explore human issues, marginality and sexuality. He defines himself as "emerging class, Indian and homosexual"; for him, self-knowledge and acceptance are the only ways to be critical.
From that moment on, his production began to explore multiple media, such as drawing, painting, photography, installations and video. With an outrageous and politically active personality, Rojas seeks to press the keys of human hypocrisy, the loss of values and the consequences of wars through powerful metaphors and the appropriation of images belonging to the standards of beauty. Much of his production revolves, in this line, around reflections on drug trafficking, consumption and violence.
His knowledge of architecture is palpably perceived in his installations, which take control over the space strategically and in harmony with their surroundings. Such is the case of the series of works called El David (2005) and the installations Por Pan (2003-2013), Unas de cal y otras de arena (2014) and El camino corto (2013). In all of them the artist explores the tension between the body and consumption, and the way in which these inhabit sometimes hegemonic, sometimes marginal scenarios.
In the 1970’s, in Colombia, Rojas's work addressed for the first time topics such as dissident sexual practices, homosexuality, and clothing as a fetish. Many of his photographs focus on erotic provocations in everyday spaces and a flaunting of sexual exhibitionism as a political banner. Rojas's own life has been the transversal feature of his work and the starting point to speak from his particular experience about universal topics.
Rojas currently lives and works in Bogota and is recognized around the world for his powerful and complex works; he has exhibited individually and collectively in Venezuela, Australia, Cuba, USA, Japan, Brazil, England and Mexico, among many other countries. His works are also part of the most important art collections around the world such as those belonging to the MoMA, the Daros Latinamerica Collection and Fundación La Caixa.
Description of the work:
The series El David (2005) – to which this number eight piece belongs – consists of twelve photographs with slight variations of the same nude man who can be seen posing in the manner of the well-known sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1501-4). The young man photographed is a mutilated Colombian soldier who lost part of his leg in one of the mines called "quiebrapatas", and the photographs are printed in such a way that his figure can be appreciated at real scale.
Rojas installed these works by hanging the images from the ceiling in one of the rooms of the Hilton Hotel in Bogota. A building in ruins, left unfinished due to corruption, located in the center of the city. This tension between the debacle of the building and the anatomical ideal of El David raises the debate between power relations and the standards of beauty, as it also reveals how the armed conflict in Colombia has affected the society. In this way, the work continues to uncover its meanings among the ruins and appears as a powerful act of protest