Pablo Guzmán (b San Agustín, Huila, 1987) creates paintings of such extraordinary accuracy that they appear to be a live representation. In effect, it is a rigorous handling of perspective, of lights and shadows, colors, and proportions. In short, of all the artifices that Western art inherited from the Renaissance to “deceive the eye”. Pablo Guzmán goes beyond these regular uses to find that the dimensions of his paintings correspond exactly to those of the object, or those of the situation represented to achieve the perfect trompe l’oeil.

Indeed, while the principal and best-known tendencies of contemporary art seem to find a way out of paintings in the installation and in the performance, Pablo Guzmán reminds us that at least until the beginning of the 19th century painting and most of the remaining two-dimensional procedures almost always had an installation disposition. A substantial part of the oil paintings that individually or in sets filled the palaces and public buildings from the 16th century, were always conceived with reference to specific spaces in which they should be installed. Therefore, removed from their original context, they lose much of their aesthetic and formal values, and are also partially deprived of their potential meaning.

In this order of ideas, the works of Pablo Guzmán quietly denounce everything that the painting lost in the context of the avant-garde due to the extreme affirmation of its autonomy. Detached from a specific space, the painting is only a painting and is worth as such. In Pablo Guzmán, on the contrary, it recovers the links with architecture and, therefore, with the scope of action and daily life, and vindicates his active condition (performative) and vital. In short, what is sought here is not so much the verisimilitude of the representation, because these paintings do not limit their interest to fix a glance on the world. What is sought is to rethink the truth of art and, in particular, of painting, which, beyond any possible philosophical reflection, can only be the result of the conviction that art is an experience of reality and that, like all human experience, it must be embodied in a specific space.