Juan Cardenas (Bogota, 1939) is not a visible artist; his name is repeated everywhere, he is a myth and a permanent reference, but seeing one of his works is not so easy. His galleries were in New York and Paris, and only in 2001 did the Banco de la República Museum hold a major retrospective of his work. And Villegas Editores -as the great guardian of Colombian art- also made an anthological book. 

Cardenas -almost 25 years later- now exhibits at La Cometa Gallery (Carrera 10 no. 94ª-25) and to see his paintings is to encounter the best painting. It is the work of an artist who understands drawing and oil painting like few others; who captures a totally strange and dreamlike universe where there are witches and creatures that seem to be taken from a Bosch painting and in which he himself -like Velázquez in the infinite trance of painting- and his charming wife Mónica Meira appear.

Juan Cardenas' paintings have a series of surprising creatures and he skillfully mixes figuration and abstraction.

Cárdenas not only lives off painting, but also inside the paintings and with the paintings: his wife Mónica -who also never tires of exhibiting- is also a great artist, and his brother, Santiago Cárdenas, has left a mark as big as his own with his umbrellas and his hyperrealist blackboards. Juan Cárdenas studied fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States. In Colombia he was a cartoonist for EL TIEMPO, La República and El Espacio, and Flash magazine. And for one of his cartoons in La República -which sparked off President Guillermo León Valencia- he ended up in jail. He then continued his career as a teacher and later, little by little, he consolidated a unique and personal work. Cardenas has exhibited in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States, recently the National Museum presented his vision of independence and the heroes, but above all, Juan Cardenas is and will be a painter. “I see painting, with its capacity for practically unlimited access to the brain and its potential to extract from it the broadest imaginative lucubrations, as the most useful and versatile tool, along with literature and music, to comment on the experiences of man in his brief passage through this world”.

 

How was the story of your imprisonment for a cartoon?
I was a political cartoonist and ended up imprisoned for criticizing, in a cartoon, using the national coat of arms, the beginning of cocaine smuggling in Colombia. I was arrested for lèse patria, for disrespecting the coat of arms. The government considered the insult to the coat of arms more important than the denunciation expressed in the cartoon and, of course, more important than freedom of expression. I was imprisoned in the jail of the former DAS for seventy-two hours, lying on the cement floor with a group of guerrillas who, when they found out that I was a political cartoonist, asked me to do a caricature for them. From out of somewhere they took out a sheet of paper and a pencil and I drew them playing cards. When they saw the caricature they laughed their heads off and called the guard to show it to them. But when the guard saw it and found out that they were playing cards, he said that it was forbidden and confiscated them. The next day I was questioned and was released, because it was intolerable for the press to put a journalist in jail, even if he was a naïve twenty-two year old boy. From there I continued my career as a cartoonist for a few years until I got a job as an anatomy professor at the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Andes.

 

Precisely, in the exhibition at La Cometa, there is a painting of an autopsy. In the late 70's you were interested in medicine and took your art students from the Andes to the morgue, do you still have that fascination for anatomy?
La Autopsia talks about the human being and the curiosity that leads him to investigate himself, but we are still a long way from knowing it. For at least two thousand years we have been trying to find out who we are and what we are. Our autopsy has not yielded any results. In the anatomy course I taught at the Universidad de los Andes, some fifty years ago, I took my students to dissect cadavers at the Universidad Javeriana at the request of Antonio Roda, director of the School of Fine Arts. The idea was not only to study the human body but to face the reality of death which, for a serious artist, is a mandatory experience. It did not last long because the students fainted.

 

What is the story behind your portrait of García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha?
My wife Monica and I started a close friendship with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his wife, Mercedes. We lived in the Polo Club and I painted at night, but in the apartment upstairs the inhabitants were making an awful noise all night dancing the Spanish sardana, when I went upstairs to complain they invited me to have a drink and dance the sardana. Gabriel was there and that night we formed a friendship that lasted until his death. Years later, when I had my painting studio in New York, Gabriel would come to pose for his portrait. President Clinton had granted him a visa that had previously been denied. One day, while there, he asked me to lend him my Olivetti portable typewriter because, he said, he was not used to writing on a computer and he needed a typewriter. At night we were going to eat at a restaurant, but it was Thanksgiving night and it was impossible to get a table. Gabriel told Monica to call his favorite restaurant and say that the table was for Garcia Marquez. It was a famous restaurant where there was no room, but by magic, Garcia Marquez's last name made a table appear, the best table in the restaurant. We had many intimate and interesting conversations, since I was a painter and not a writer, Gabriel felt that I was no competition. However, we never shared his socialist ideas, which were the cause of several discussions.

 

The 2001 exhibition at the Luis Angel Arango Library has been one of the most important -or the most important- that has been made so far about your work, almost a quarter of a century has passed and your production is still going on, is it time for another exhibition?
Due to life circumstances, my artistic career developed more in Europe and New York than in Colombia. I was linked to a Parisian art gallery with which I remained for many years. As time went by, Miguel Urrutia, who was manager of the Banco de la República, offered me an exhibition at the Luis Angel Arango Library in 2001, which is one of the few exhibitions I have had in Colombia. Perhaps because figurative painting was not in fashion and had practically fallen into oblivion. There has been no one to teach it seriously. That is probably the reason why there are so few painters today.

 

The exhibition has the constant presence of your wife and her self-portraits, but also of some rather strange, shadowy creatures, Clotho, Lachelis and Atropos, why are they there?
Among the characters in my paintings, my wife, Monica, often appears and reappears. For me, she symbolizes the human being and I use her because I do not tolerate the presence of strange models in my studio while I paint. But from time to time other strange characters filter into my paintings such as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, three grotesque women, daughters of the Greek god, Zeus, according to Greek mythology. They were in charge of the life of human beings: Clotho unwinds the thread of life, Lachesis measures its length and Atropos cuts it with her scissors.

 

Why is painting so important in art?

The art of painting, which is the art of placing marks on a surface, is a strange genetic faculty of human beings that has manifested itself since remote antiquity in the caves of Altamira and that, along with writing and music, is the best way to comment on their concerns and experiences of their passage through this world. No other organism on this planet possesses these aptitudes and, with the passage of time, man has developed them to exceptional levels that have earned him the qualification of “art”. There they can be seen in the museums of the world. In modern times, there has been an attempt to discredit and annul the exercise of painting, as if it were possible to eliminate a genetic faculty programmed in the human organism. It has been accused of being archaic, old-fashioned, retrograde and antiquated and incapable of saying anything important to modern man. This was argued by the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp and the German theorist Walter Benjamin, among others. But there is no other technique that offers a more direct access to the human brain or that allows him more possibilities, breadth and richness to comment on his experiences than the art of painting. The European artistic tradition (which is not the same as the academy) has recognized, admired and privileged the original painter, who has captured his own vision, important and captivating with his art, and not the one who follows the fashions and trends of the moment that the theoreticians of the northern hemisphere command us and force us to abide by on pain of disappearing as an artist for not obeying and following the current. Fashion is a manifestation of mass taste and is the antithesis of good art. It is a monstrosity, an invention of art theorists and art historians.

 

Duchamp or Picasso?

Duchamp's entire oeuvre is motivated by sex and eroticism from his youth, when he was secretly and erotically in love with his sister, through his urinal and the drawing with his own semen that he sent to his girlfriend, to his culminating work, “The Large Glass”, in which he alludes to a girlfriend and her many lads. Apparently he found it difficult to differentiate between sex and intellect. And, as if that were not enough, among his abundant ridiculous statements, he declared that he had visited the fourth dimension, for that was the time when Einstein's theory of relativity was in vogue. Sanity of that caliber cannot be taken seriously. Duchamp always made fun of science without ever having studied it. As for Picasso, although he was a good painter, he was humanly abject. His grandson committed suicide and his wives spoke ill of him. Between Duchamp and Picasso I choose Van Gogh, who was also no angel, but he opened the doors to the subconscious before the surrealists.

 

Which artist would you like to be portrayed by?

My wife Monica has already started my portrait. It seems to be going very well; she won't let me see it, but I can see her laughing her head off behind the easel. And, by the way, she is the artist I admire most in Colombia, because she has been painting next to me for fifty years and I know she paints very well. Obviously, I also consider her the most important artist in the world.

 

Have you ever cried in front of a work of art?

I never cry, and only once I cried in front of a work by Duchamp, but because it was bad. 

Do you keep your childhood drawings?

No. I follow the example of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who burned his bad drawings so that posterity would not judge him by them.
What universal work of art would you like to have in your living room?
There are several, but they are very expensive. I've been putting coins in my ceramic piggy bank for fifty years; one never loses hope.

 

Are NFT and digital art the future?

Maybe it will be for those who follow fads, but not for me. I never had much respect for the adherents who follow the orders of the Nordic theorists. I prefer the genius artist who has a unique personality and overflowing talent, impossible to imitate.

 

 

By: FERNANDO GOMEZ ECHEVERRY