BORDES at the CAF

In the search for a greater reflection on the changeable value that reaches the borders, in the context of the present Latin American reality, the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and the Embassy of the Republic of Colombia, announced the opening in Caracas on June 12 of the BORDES exhibition.

"Our show brings together works that deal with the thematic ambivalence between separation and union. Both elements are presented as linked factors and possessors of an opposed dynamic with constant feedback," Ana Mercedes Botero, CAF cultural and community director, explained. "The idea of exhibitions like the one we are presenting in our gallery is to exploit and promote our cultural heritage, and social and community richness as tools of human development."

Isadora de Norden, cultural counselor of the Colombian Embassy, said "Colombia and Venezuela share an important cultural legacy whose political expression leads us inevitably to take actions that bring us together."

About Hoyos and Bugallo

The BORDES exhibition reflects, in the expression and intuition of these painters, the avatars implicit in the theme of integration. Hoyos, born in 1952 in Sahún in Cordoba Department, Colombia is an historian, a graduate of Bogotá National University. In his career as an artist, which goes back 20 years, his work has been shown in collective exhibitions in galleries in Bogotá, New York, Cartagena, and other cities. He has also been invited to participate in the I Caribbean and Central American Biennial in the Dominican Republic, among others.

Bugallo, born in Caracas in 1958, studied in the Arturo Michelena School of Plastic Arts in Valencia, Carabobo state. Since 1983 his work has been shown in collective exhibitions in museums and galleries in Caracas and New York. He won an award in the Arturo Michelena Gallery of Valencia, in the National Plastic Arts Gallery of the Fine Arts Museum and has taken part in the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador and the Biarritz Festival in France.

As Germán Rubiano Caballero describes it from Bogotá, there are coincidences between these two artists, such as showing pictures on different supports, which constitute or could constitute a whole, however, the actual work of Cristo Hoyos and Bugallo has nothing in common.

Rubiano explains: "The Colombian has always worked on day-to-day reality and has made an emotive reference to personages, environments and more recently to close and enclosed landscapes and to utilitarian objects still used in the region of his ancestors. In contrast, the Venezuelan has produced works that recall the history of painting since the Renaissance, in which we are surprised by his capacity to recreate a famous iconography which he is capable of filling with new contents and formalisms, some very similar to techniques of abstract painting."

There is no doubt that the artistic perception of both emphasizes, from two different attitudes, the complex human interpretation of the border zone, the transient and circumstantial value of borders, where the territory shows us all the relativity of its dimension. We see it as the abstraction of a landscape to which we give the names that characterize a country, Rubiano concludes.