LUIS GUZMÁN

Bogota, Colombia, 1976

ADRIÁN IBÁÑEZ GALERÍA

Luis Guzmán lives and works in Brussels. He frequently uses the basic scheme of the Renaissance space cube in his drawings. Deliberately enjoying the naivety of this old trick, he gradually delimits and opens the virtual space inside the paper. With the lines and diagonals of that skeleton begins to glimpse a composition. Light, shadow, landscape, human figure, and various other elements fall on stage; they look for the exact place to rest in this playfield, becoming perfect excuses for drawing and exploring the possibilities of charcoal.
Furthermore, we shall underline the meanings and symbologies that this archetypal architecture can entail. The title of the series, “Inner Life” proposes two readings that complement each other instead of becoming opposites.
On one hand we can understand the reference that makes to the simple life of humans indoors that seems to be displayed in the style of a dollhouse. The eye of the observer then rises to a higher level, a kind of divine sight, voyeuristic perhaps, or simply vigilant.
On the other hand, the title also seems to refer to a certain spiritual life, the life that takes place within ourselves, and that we can read in the silence of the images, in a certain ritual character of the scenes, or in the representations of light in the form of beams, ovals or haloes.