For Paris Photo 2026, La Cometa presents a solo exhibition by Miguel Ángel Rojas (Bogotá, 1946) centered on the foundational series of his photographic work. The exhibition coincides with La Noche, the retrospective the Museo Reina Sofía is dedicating to the artist in Madrid, the most ambitious to date. It offers a concentrated reading of the medium through which Rojas first articulated the questions that run through five decades of his practice: the gaze, desire, the body, and its public exposure. 

At the heart of the proposal are the series Faenza, Mogador, and Imperio, made in the 1970s in the downtown Bogotá cinemas that give each body of work its name. In the half-light of these theaters, men met furtively at a time when homosexuality was punishable under the Colombian penal code and condemned by public morality. Rojas, a participant in this clandestine sociability, carried a hidden camera and recorded what took place. The resulting images are grainy, often circular in format, and charged with the urgency of the moment they were taken. They are not detached reportage; they are the testimony of someone looking from within. Through them, Rojas made visible what society, and the state itself, preferred to ignore. In doing so, he opened a space for dialogue, as uncomfortable as it was necessary, around communities long rendered invisible. 

These series reveal a twofold pioneering character. Rojas embraced photography as an artistic language when Latin American criticism had yet to fully recognize it as such. At the same time, he gave visual form to a reality that had no place in representation. The images also engage the viewer’s body. The texture of the grain and the density of the darkness draw viewers into the theater, within reach of the bodies, and make them complicit in the furtive gaze. 

Matter has always carried meaning in Rojas’s work. In that spirit, the selection places digital prints of his most emblematic images in dialogue with a group of vintage gelatin silver prints enlarged from the original negatives. The coexistence of analog and digital reveals the breadth of his photographic exploration, from the materiality of the darkroom to the reactivation of an archive that remains largely unseen. It also underscores how relevant these images remain half a century later. 

The presentation is completed by David Análogo, a landmark work in the artist’s career. It marks the hinge between his early, intimate explorations and the political and social critique that defines his later production. Rojas portrays José Antonio, a young soldier maimed in combat by an antipersonnel landmine, known in Colombia as a quiebrapatas, or “leg-breaker.” He asks him to pose as Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David, the Renaissance emblem of ideal male beauty. Three names converge here: the biblical hero, the Florentine master, and Rojas himself, whose first name is the Spanish form of Michelangelo’s. The work engages one of the founding icons of Western art and questions the canons of beauty we have learned to admire. Tradition has long celebrated the beauty of marbles fragmented by time, yet rarely that of a body wounded by war. By laying the wound over the perfection of the classical model, Rojas restores to the mutilated body the heroic dignity the canon once reserved for the idealized one. Today, the image has become a symbol of the suffering of the victims of Colombia’s armed conflict. 

Between the darkness of the cinema and the frontal image of the soldier, the presentation traces an arc that runs through Rojas’s work: the passage from biography to the memory of a nation, and the body as the surface on which that memory is inscribed. In Paris, and in dialogue with La Noche, the proposal affirms Rojas’s central place in the history of Latin American photography and the enduring urgency of a gaze that, from the margins, has persistently made visible what others have sought to conceal.