Omar Rayo

Biography

The Rayo Museum opened on 20 January 1981, the artist’s own birthday, and stands in Roldanillo, a town in the department of Valle del Cauca, where he was born. Rayo put up the money himself, and the state helped later. The building was designed by the Mexican architect Leopoldo Gout.

Rayo did not begin with geometry at all. He was born on 20 January 1928, and in 1945 he started drawing caricatures for newspapers in Bogotá and Cali. He was educated by correspondence. He began exhibiting in 1948. From 1954 he travelled around Latin America, studying and getting to know local art scenes. Thanks to a grant he lived in Mexico in 1959–1960, then moved to New York and spent about ten years there. In those years his manner took its final form: severe geometric figures built on black, white, red and yellow. He is counted among the Op Art artists, that is, those whose art plays with optical effects. He worked as a painter, draughtsman and sculptor, but prints and drawings remained his main techniques, or the museum would hardly carry the name it does. In 1970 Rayo won the Salón de Artistas Colombianos. One of his most prominent exhibitions is considered to be “20 Years, 100 Works: Omar Rayo” in the National Room of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico.

To my mind, the most interesting thing about his geometry is that it does not look cold: he took traces of the past and built new visual moves from them, so that ornament and plan turn out to be relatives. That is, however, my own reading; the artist himself, as far as the available information goes, did not make a theory of it.

The museum in Roldanillo opened with a collection of about two thousand works by Rayo and some five hundred works by other Latin American artists. The building has a library, exhibition rooms, a graphic arts workshop and a theatre. The museum’s foundation continues to hold events to promote the arts in the region.

Rayo died on 7 June 2010. Palmira is usually given as the place of his death: it was there, on the road from Roldanillo to Cali, that his condition deteriorated sharply, and he was pronounced dead at a hospital in Cali. Later, in 2012, Google marked his 84th birthday with a Google Doodle on its home page.