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Mil dibujos
Esteban Peña
Bogotá, Colombia
Issue #69 Jun - Aug 2008

Nicolás Robbio

The book Mil dibujos (A Thousand Drawings) of artist Esteban Peña, edited by Laguna Libros (Bogotá, Colombia), brings together a selection of forty reproductions of drawings that represent images of photocopies taken from the photographs of works of art published in Universal Art History books. Each of the reproductions is accompanied by a text written by an artist, historian, curator, or someone close to the artist or to the editors, who is invited to write whatever he or she wishes concerning the artist’s work, the original of the work of art represented, or both. The drawings included in the book proceed from a series of one thousand – carried out by the artist and a group of collaborators – that consists of the tracing with ink dots on paper of the stains, textures, and contours of photocopies of works of art, whose entirety embraces authors of distinct moments in history. A great many of the works chosen correspond to paintings, sculptures, or graphic works that are easily recognized by the specialized reader, as well as by the general public. In his proposal, Esteban Peña homogenizes an identical visual condition of the works of art of whatever era and by whatever author, by means of the utilization of the resource within the same format. The artist reinterprets the images of important artworks through a drawing exercise that allows him to make reference to the photocopy as a reproduction resource alluding to the modes of the diffusion and preservation of the memory of the works of art, and that modifies the forms of perception and interpretation of the latter.
Each of the guests invited to write in Mil dibujos – whether a professional in the art field or individuals foreign to the field – proposes a different manner of coming close to the work of Esteban Peña and/or of the original art work. All of the texts that accompany the images included in Mil dibujos highlight the multiple possibilities that the images offer for being read and interpreted, whether from the relating of a personal experience, a literary narration, an academic perspective, a short anecdote, or even from the appropriation of the words of other authors.
The book represents the first project published by Laguna Libros. It is a novel editorial proposal interested in promoting and coordinating publications related with the Colombian artistic panorama. In this manner, the publication of the book accompanied the exhibit of Esteban Peña – of the same name – in which a very much greater percentage of the artist’s drawings was shown, grouped according to technical or diverse formal classifications.
Mil dibujos allows the reader to come to know the work of a young artist from Bogotá, whose artistic oeuvre seeks to explore the expressive possibilities of the drawing in a reflexively way, and similarly allows the reader to relate to, under new visual and interpretive parameters, the works of Goya, Renoir, Seurat, Klimt, Rothko, Velásquez, Giotto, Ingres, Warhol, Magritte, Beuys, Pollock, Vermeer, Duchamp, Manet, Picasso, Viola, Monet, Lam, Schiele, and many others.

Nicolás Gómez

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