Francisco Mejía Guinand

At the beginning of the nineties, the first large-format paintings by Francisco Mejía Guinand (Bogotá 1964) burst onto the Colombian art scene.

In the Colombia of that time, characterized by an interest in art as an idea, the majority of young artists devoted themselves to the most diverse variants of conceptual art. That is why within this context a work that, like that of Mejía Guinand, does not intend to mean but to be is admirable.

The surprising images that this book presents allow us to assure that, despite the constant current assertion that painting has come to an end, Mejía Guinand's work is the only one that, within the pictorial production of Colombia in the last decade , has demonstrated a strong respect for the tradition of painting as a medium. Its large formats are radical, they have no beginning or end. They are fragments of a whole that is nourished by the legacy of universal art history. He does not deny it, he restores it to go further, with the humility of someone looking for the first time, but without ceasing to be himself.

Mejía Guinand, undoubtedly a novel figure within continental art, covers an extensive terrain of pictorial references that demand sharper contemplation from the viewer.

Mejía Guinand's images, as Ana María Escallón points out in the essay that opens this book, "are silent images because they appeal to the internal voice where color speaks for itself. They are intimate territories that find meaning in the luminosity of a green, the "tactile vision of a blue or the silence of a stark black. The very moment when painting, in its capacity to mean, evokes all things."

Francisco Mejía Guinand (Bogotá, 1964) was born a painter, he couldn't help it. The childhood forays into the studio of his father, an amateur painter, and the visits led by his mother to the great museums of the world, perhaps began to clear the inner path to his vocation as an artist very early.

Over time he would study architecture, teach classes, work in urban recovery and architectural restoration, just to reaffirm what he already knew: that the only thing he wanted to do in life was paint. Therefore, everything he did from now on would only validate his final decision to embrace the world of volumes and spaces from his desire as a painter. So, based on his intuition and now at peace with himself, Mejía Guinand has been building a solid universe of planes and colors, which this book, the first dedicated entirely to his work, displays with astonishing fidelity.

Ana María Escallón , a specialist in Latin American art, is currently the director and curator of the Art Museum of the Americas, in Washington, DC. She has also worked as a journalist, historian, international curator and art critic.

In 1997 Villegas Editores published the book Botero. New works on canvas , whose central text is an extensive interview by Ana María Escallón with the artist, considered one of the most eloquent testimonies given by the painter about his life and artistic career. In this book, Ana María Escallón contextualizes the work of Francisco Mejía Guinand within the contemporary artistic panorama, while analyzing its evolution and confirming its fortunate insertion into the world of the plastic arts.