La Cascada: vista del Cartama desde la vereda La Mesa

LA CASCADA: VISTA DEL CARTAMA DESDE LA VEREDA LA MESA

Solo Show
MAJA Museum

Jericó, Colombia

Installation View

Across the vast plain, slowly
the river drags its silver torrent
whose purest waters reflect
the dazzling blue of the skies…

Aníbal Vallejo Álvarez
(fragment from “Tierra caliente”)

The Cartama River, witness to time and life in southwestern Antioquia, winds its way through the memory of those who have walked its banks and gazed upon its silver currents mirroring the blue of the skies. In this exhibition, Aníbal Vallejo invites us on an intimate and personal journey that recreates landscapes that have shaped his childhood, family history, and creative process.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, a large-scale asymmetric polyptych, unfolds across twelve panels of varying sizes, composing a visual narrative of accumulated thoughts, prolonged observations, and memories transformed into painting. Brushstrokes, lines, and textures form a reflection in motion — a constant search for harmony. The landscape, observed from the family estate La Cascada, in the La Mesa village of the municipality of Támesis, emerges in every fragment, in every stroke. The polyptych is a visual and emotional puzzle that invites viewers to reconstruct the sensations the artist has accumulated over the years.

La Cascada: View of the Cartama River from La Mesa is a tribute to southwestern Antioquia — a region imbued with landscapes, colors, scents, and sounds that evoke the depths of the artist’s childhood. The mountains, the sunrises and sunsets that bathed his grandparents' home in light and mist, come alive in this work. The Cartama River, silent and majestic, appears not just as a physical element but as a symbol of connection between generations and territories — separating and uniting the municipalities of the region.

Vallejo invites us to share his memory, to see through his eyes, and to discover how those landscapes are reborn and take on a new form. As his grandfather expresses in the poem Tierra caliente, the river not only carries water but also memories, experiences, and the very soul of that land.

This exhibition is also an opportunity for the public to discover Vallejo’s creative process — a journey of transformation culminating in the main piece. Additional works of varying formats serve as variations and reflections that document this process, showing how the work breaks down and reassembles through sketches and studies that are part of a larger whole. One example is The Hours, a series of five successive small-format paintings that evoke Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the Thames River in London at the end of the 19th century. Like the French painter, Vallejo reveals a single point of view in different tones, inevitably capturing the passage of time. Complementing the exhibition is Farallón, a sculpture made of cotton rope, intervened with acrylic paint strokes. Conceived as a spatial drawing, this piece subtly suggests the outlines of the surrounding mountains and continues the embroidered language recurrent in Vallejo’s work.

The exhibition is not merely a gaze into the past; it is an encounter with the essence of what painting means to Vallejo: an act of continuous thought, a search for balance that, like the river, flows endlessly.

INSTALLATION VIEWS