In the Great Magdalena River, its sinuous turns carry the force of millennia. In the ebb and flow of its murky waters, the stories of Indigenous peoples, colonizers, fishermen, peasants, navigators, and adventurers intertwine. This winding river, which forms a valley between the Central and Eastern mountain ranges, crosses through its contradictory, fertile, and painful course more than twenty departments.

In Magdalena, Mario Vélez evokes the river and reinterprets it through his own visual language. His characteristic forms ovals, bones, and organic bodies emerge on two pictorial planes that interlace like warp and weft. Each work possesses a symbolic cartography in which tensions between indolence and desire are both hidden and revealed. It is an exercise in contradiction, as the ordered grid created by the mesh where the canvases intersect is subverted by Vélez, becoming a window an opening toward the infinite nature of the river, its landscape, and the territory it inhabits.

The layers and colors translate into rhythms that evoke the feminine essence of the river. Every gesture, every composition, is deliberate; chance has no place here. Vélez’s tropical palette of blazing oranges, deep blues, vibrant greens wrapped in purples and violets not only alludes to the chromatic richness of the landscape but also reconstructs the river’s emotional intensity: its exuberant vitality and its threatened fragility. Vélez is like a chronicler from another time. He enters the river to reveal it, understand it, live it, and represent it through his singular gaze. This tacit landscape, under the shade of caracolí, ceiba, and guamo trees witnesses to struggles and resistance bears the imprint of the armed conflict, a specter that still lingers along its banks. This history is recognized by Vélez through both the real and the imagined in his paintings, where the river is mirror and
wound, memory and future.

Text and curatorship:
Viviana Mejía