La Cometa’s presentation for ARTBO 2026 brings together the work of eleven Colombian artists whose trajectories make it possible to traverse decades of image production in the country, from Juan Cárdenas, trained in the classical craft of drawing and heir to a tradition that made the body a territory of self-reflection, to the generation that came of age in digital environments. Across that arc the image has taken the forms of oil on canvas, of bronze and stone, of pastel on paper and photography, but also those of bread, drywall, fique fiber, mortar, and a white flag, materials in which one can read, almost with the value of a document, the economic and political history that produced them.

That documentary condition of matter runs through much of the selection. The fique that Rosana Escobar braids against the grid of the loom arrives in the work charged with the history of the coffee sack, whose production chain the artist traced back to the plant; Carlos Castro replicated the statue of Bolívar in bread and let the pigeons, facing the Capitolio, decompose the rigidity of its monumentality; the capitals that Alejandro Sánchez reconstructs in drywall preserve the appearance of classical solidity in a material conceived to be replaced, and in Libia Posada’s empty first-aid cabinets, traversed by a white flag, medicine can only offer the empty form of care where war has suspended its capacity to act. Something similar occurs with Fernando Pinto’s heads, which carry the expressiveness of ceramics into the smiling fear of the present, rendered in stone, and with the barely suggested figures that Johan Samboni raises in mortar, suspended in the imaginary of unfinished construction.

Alongside that material line runs another that interrogates the image regimes of truth. Cárdenas subjects the board of directors, that uniform body of authority, to the scrutiny of anatomical drawing; Miguel Ángel Rojas displaces the verse of a Christmas carol to point to the glyphosate fumigation of the Colombian countryside; María Fernanda Cardoso undresses Linnaeus’s nuptial taxonomy through deep-focus photography, and Camilo Restrepo turns his own medical records into a drawn counter-narrative, while Luis Roldán’s recent painting registers, layer upon layer, the very process of painting.

What articulates the whole is perhaps the question of what remains of representation once it ceases to be neutral, a question that Colombian art has had to formulate from within its own conditions, marked by the armed conflict and by the active inheritances of the colonial, and which today occupy a central place in the discussion of the contemporary image.