Luis Fernando Roldán is an artist whose work, spanning painting, drawing, collage, installation, altered objects, and ceramics, centers on his insistence on structure and on the ways in which form, color, and gesture determine how an image is perceived. Yet this structure does not operate as a system applied in the same way across media, but rather as a matrix that the artist finds in dissimilar materials and situations, allowing works separated by decades to recognize one another. His work can thus be read as variations on a single formal axis, rather than as independent pieces, with elements that migrate from one medium to another over time and are organized into closed series or heterogeneous groupings that, like puzzles, ultimately come together in the viewer. 

The method that sustains this continuity is intuitive and makes error the condition of knowledge. It is an open-ended inquiry that does not necessarily follow a plan, so that each work generates the next and materials arrive as finds, sometimes gathered on the street —doors, pieces of wood, grilles— and at other times taken from his own domestic inventory. These materials enter the work without losing their character, yet they are subjected to a composition that orders them, in a tension between the chaos of the material and the order of the structure, and in that encounter a fracture occurs that is capable of transforming an image one had thought familiar. Something similar guides his relationship to the constructive tradition, whose modular logic he takes up only to divert it toward deliberately disarticulated structures in which fragments of everyday life intersect. 

Luis Roldán studied Architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 and Art History at the École du Louvre in Paris. In 2016, the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República presented Periplo. Una retrospectiva 1986-2016, which brought together sixty works from three decades of production. He took part in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), in the IILA Latin American Pavilion, and in the X Biennale Monterrey FEMSA (2012). His awards include the II Premio Luis Caballero (2000), the Painting Prize at the XXXVI Salón Nacional de Artistas (1996) for Calendario, and the Visual Arts New Work Award from the Wisconsin Arts Board (1990). His work is held in the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; El Museo del Barrio, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the Deutsche Bank Collection in New York; the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami; and, in Colombia, the Museo Nacional de Colombia, the Banco de la República Art Collection, the Museo La Tertulia and the Museums of Modern Art of Bogotá and Medellín, among others.