Carlos Jacanamijoy

Biography

Standing before a blank canvas, Jacanamijoy once said, is like looking out of “that other window”. He said so in 2007, when the exhibition “Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination” was on at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York, the branch of the National Museum of the American Indian.

He was born on 27 March 1964 in Santiago, in Putumayo, in southern Colombia. He belongs to the Inga people, the indigenous population of that region. He studied art in several cities. In 1983–1984 he studied fine arts at the Universidad de La Sabana in Bogotá. The following year he moved to Pasto and continued his studies at the University of Nariño. From 1986 to 1990 he studied at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and received a master’s degree in plastic arts. In parallel, from 1989, he studied philosophy and literature at La Salle University, finishing the course in 1990.

He has spoken himself about where his paintings come from. By his account, one source is his work in the studio, the other a succession of memories of the jungle in Putumayo. He recalled a night in the middle of the jungle, when the cacophony of animals sounded among lights and shadows, and admitted that this stream of memory and dreams passes before him when he stands in front of the empty canvas. The Navajo curator Kathleen Ash-Milby described his painting as vivid landscapes in which, through abstractions of colour and light, the creation and transformation of the Putumayo jungle are embodied. To my mind, the word “abstractions” matters in that description: what we see is not the forest as it looks but the forest as it was remembered.

He has also painted figurative works; his portrait of the writer Gabriel García Márquez is known.

His work has been shown in Colombia at the Luis Ángel Arango Library of the Bank of the Republic in Bogotá, the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, the La Tertulia Museum in Cali, the Museum of Modern Art in Pereira and the Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. The exhibition in New York in 2007 gave him access to an American audience. The number of his solo exhibitions has passed 25. His works have entered the permanent collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as the collections of several Colombian museums.

He lives and works in Bogotá.