Armando Villegas: A Tribute

Inscribed in the history of Colombian art, both by merit and in his own right, Armando Villegas is an exceptional case. Not only does he move confidently through abstraction and figuration, but in both of them the unmistakable signs of his attachment to the pre-Columbian traditions of his native Peru underlie and emerge, assumed by the artist as irrevocable proof of his identity. Related to the avant-garde of the fifties, Villegas was soon recognized as one of the continent's first abstract artists. It is “a dialogue between tradition and rupture… a work that resists definitive formulas,” as Óscar Collazos notes in the essay that opens this book. The inexhaustible power of the artist prevents him from limiting himself to a single form of expression, a single technique, a single theme. The result? An inexhaustible work through which drawings, oil paintings, mixed oil paintings, sculptures, sculptural objects, murals, collages and graphic works harmoniously transit.