This art is not an obvious visual art; it is a codified art.
What you actually see is not what the paintings mean.
Almost all the paintings done by the artist were designed to please the eye. However, many paintings are composed of several layers of visual information, codes, specific colors having meaning, and symbols. Some are obvious and some hidden so deeply that even the artist sometimes forgot what he meant years after he painted them. The codification can range from very simple; as two superimposed paintings, to a codified and elaborately subtle meaning of each detail of the painting.
Three examples are presented. In the other paintings, you may want to test yourself.
Painting from 2007. “40” This is an elaborately codified painting.
Apart from what you see, the many numbers, simply drawn or hidden within another symbol,
are important dates, events, and combination of periods in the life of the model for
this painting. As they are private, they will not be explained further. The background
represents her age when the painting was completed. The yellow figures are gold representations
of ancient gods and ornaments from the pre-Hispanic Gold museum in Bogota, Colombia; their layout are numbers representing events in her life that will not be explained. The colors within some numbers represent the colors of Mexico’s flag and Colombia’s flag (country of her youth). The Star of David represents itself and the chandelier is the symbol of the state of Israel, an important lost Jewish relic, both related to her life. You are welcome to test yourself on the meaning of several dozen Catalan codes embedded in the painting, if you can pull them away from imaginary symbols representing nothing and were inserted as camouflage. |
 |
|
|
Painting from 1988. “A small village (Rudesheim) on the River Rein, Germany.” This is a painting made of two superimposed paintings. What you see is an artistic view of a small town in Germany, but each line of this village is controlled by a hidden drawing underneath that is barely obvious. |
This segment was written to assist viewers who wonder “what does all this mean?”
and requested explanations from the artist.
