Less words and more color

Less words and more color is the byword of Alejandro Fischer Cárdenas, a painter who couldn’t help but be a painter thanks to the artistic vein that runs through his family: Santiago and Juan Cárdenas, his uncles, are proof enough. This young painter-who prefers to be called a draughtsman-is 32 years old, went to school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and is now working and living there with his wife Melissa and his daughter Alina.

He walks through the museums, he pauses in front of the images that hypnotize him for entire weeks, he studies the color, lines, composition and styles of each of the works of art history that have been his inspiration for the art in this first show he’s exhibiting Bogotá. Leonardo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Picasso, Schiele, the German expressionists, Beckman, are some of the names he repeats when asked suddenly about his influences. All so anachronic that “if these portraits weren’t all together, they would seem to be done by multiple hands; they’re done very differently, the character itself, the technique, vary depending on my mood”, explains the artist. And this is clear-paranoid self-portraits, hidden gestures, penetrating looks and other lost in space, reveal his spirit, explore his psychology.

He also paints his closest family members-his father, his grandmother, transcribing their souls through his painting. Likewise, he explores the field of the nude figure, which he approaches less realistically. He exhibits small figures which seek to critique the perfect measurements sold by publicity ads. The minuscule figures within a surrounding immensity, like a mass that is not even posing-it’s just there, it hides, it plays, it walks, it observes.

And in closing, he shows a selection of landscapes, one of which is an homage to Boudin, but which recall the school of the landscapists of the Bogotá Savannah in the early twentieth century. And He also replicates their materials: oil on wood. Peaceful, light, clean views that indicate where his work will be headed. Now he is going back, loaded with ideas on synthesis and leaving us to contemplate his oeuvre.