Miguel Ángel Rojas

This dynamic presence of the materials is derived from the search for ways of talking about things which have not been talked about. And it is derived from the conception of art as a space for emphasis which does not fit in a society that wipes away that which is different through sarcasm or abuse; firstly, due to his condition as a homosexual, and secondly, because he is permanently ill at ease with the situations of injustice in our country.

To this early period, when his sexual condition was his vital laboratory, belongs his work Boca (Mouth). It is an engraving dated 1973, featuring a man in jeans and denim jacket, wearing boots and standing with his back to the viewer. And where is his mouth? Well, the print does not show this; the center of the image is a blind field that is, however, active; instead of showing the encounter between two men, it describes visually in a delightful way the folds of the jacket and the boot heels. If art implies broadening the world, then it must be said that in the 1970s Miguel Ángel Rojas spoke for the first time in our country of ́other ́ sexual practices, of homosexuality and of clothes as fetish. After his first works, the blue jeans and boots of a man firmly planted on a floor splotched with semen, or showing off, his body leaning against a wall in the darkness of a movie theater, became the protagonists in a society whose clothes are a territory of the self. A territory of erotic provocations in the spaces of everyday life. For, in fact, eroticism is located beyond the field, and it is sometimes more intense if it is veiled. Such is the case of the series Faenza, dated 1979, a series of photographs taken in a movie theater in downtown Bogotá, which was actually the place for gay rendezvous at that time. The extended-exposure photographs make it possible to catch a glimpse of and imagine these individuals who meet “in the darkness of the stalls or the complicity of the restrooms”, in the artist ́s own words. These encounters are documented in the series Sobre porcelana (On porcelain), in which Miguel Ángel Rojas features photographs taken through small peepholes in the doors of these bathrooms. Immediately after these series imbued with a documentary tone, his installations appeared. I think this was a very interesting step from the subjective to the objective; what I mean is that this allowed the artist to situate his personal experiences in a public space. According to Rojas:

“Subjetivo (1982) is a self-referential work. I transformed the gallery into a different space, into a sort of setting with no apparent theatricality, through the use of drawing and engraving. Only the light and the sound of water running down a drain confronted the viewer with the disturbing presence of deterioration and abandonment. “Subjetivo is, for me, a self-portrait, a lugubrious basement showing what my emotions were in those days”.
Also self-referential, but in a different sense, perhaps tracing its origins to the spaces in peasant homes is Grain, dated 1980, an installation which the artist has defined as a popular portrait: on the actual floor of the exhibition space, Miguel Ángel drew the tiled floor in his home using soil he gathered in his grandparents ́ native region. All of us recognize ourselves, in the tiled-floor in Grain, in our condition as a peasant and emerging class, and also what sociologists call “the middle class”.

It seems to me that Grain conjured his peasant ancestors and opened up, even up to the present, the possibility of expressing, through art, the discomfort that the situations of injustice in Latin America produced in him: Caloto (1992) is a painting that recalls a massacre of Indigenous people in the state of Cauca; his technique is that of “partially developed photography”, for the killing and the humiliation are glimpsed between brushstrokes of developer and fixative. Caquetá (2007) is a video featuring a man attempting to remove camouflage paint with his stumps. El David (2005), is a young man with harmonious features, naked, who poses in front of the camera as Michelangelo Buonarroti ́s sculpture. Calmly, he poses and shows one of his legs, mutilated by a “legbreaker” mine. Miguel Ángel Rojas insists upon the fact that his interest is to use these works to demonstrate against war anywhere in the world, or against any faction vindicating it as a strategy.

I find his paintings, which I consider unique in Colombian art, to be a very interesting parenthesis. They are canvases on which he paints ordinary, everyday spaces that one can walk through, featuring chairs and tables that might belong to any of us. But what is important is that we visit an ordinary space that is eroticized, threatening, depressed, the ambit of an individual immersed in the anesthetics of television, but an ambit allowing, at the same time, the boasting of a sexual exhibitionism; it permits the practice of so many private rites impossible to be subdued by power. Luz de luna (Moonlight), dated 1992, and Viendo el noticiero desde las torres (Watching the news from the towers), 1992, are large-format works in which the character defines himself sexually in a room he makes his own because it is the territory of pleasure, but he also finds other identification signs in Pre-Columbian signs and in coca. From that moment on, the production and consumption of cocaine would become Miguel Ángel Rojas ́s main concern, and it remains so to date. Once again, from private to public.
The coca leaves have adopted a dramatic shape; they have been used to compose works showing contrasting realities. I highlight La visita (The visit), 2007, a rug made from coca leaves sewn together into bunches, and on top of it, a sofa designed by Le Corbusier. From its base there emerge the roar of cannons and war cries amid light flashes. Impossible not to evoke a territory at war, forgotten through the convenience of the majority of the Colombian people, lazing comfortably in their chairs. I also highlight ¡Bratatá!, a drawing based on Roy Lichtenstein ́s As I opened fire. The cannons in the original painting, rendered in this case with coca-leaf dots and dollar bills cut into confetti-like discs, sum up the problem of the flow of money between coca producer and consumer countries, a flow that ends up financing the purchase of arms and perpetuating war in Latin America. Miguel Ángel Rojas, political individual. Today, the political individual is strongly pertinent; the individual who refuses to be ignored because he is different, and the one who, through specific images, reveals the fabric of the local situation.