Selva Adentro is the continuation of a series of large-format paintings that the artist began creating in Colombia during the pandemic. This series initially bore the title Nomen Nescio, without a name. In it, black and white dominate the composition, carrying emotion into a solemn, restrained aesthetic space: a cold, neutral realm, a limbo in which tensions and ruptures give form to absence, to emptiness. That which has no name, yet persists as a tangible and symbolic presence.

According to its creators, the viewer bears witness to what remains as evidence of having been, of having existed. In Selva Adentro, DENARVAEZ turns to color—vivid red—to a chromatic range that suggests skin: human skin, vegetal skin, bark; intertwined limbs, organic forms, branches, vines, tearing and knots, vestiges that evoke what was, is, and will be life. Hence the title of the exhibition.

“In these paintings there is matter, tension, rupture. Everything is organic in a way that is both vegetal and human, because it is nervous and visceral: everything is fiber, muscle, trunk, and branching; yet we also feel that everything is at once vital pulsation and decomposition. An exploration into the entrails of living matter, where the jungle and the organism are one and the same, where life and death are manifestations of a single miracle and a single tragedy, where matter is spirit and, in its contortions, releases a cry that is at once painful and triumphant,” affirms William Ospina.

2024
Bogotá, Colombia

2024
Bogotá, Colombia

Las metamorfosis retrospective

2014
Bogotá, Colombia

The Colombian painter Arturo Denarvaez presents a series of monumental, larger-than-life works on the myth of Icarus, expressing a fascination with all that flies, which he connects to our human condition, poised between sky and earth.

2011
Montreuil, Franceon de l’élément

In November, Nancy Olivier welcomes the Colombian painter Arturo Denarvaez to Espace 111 for the first time.

He presents a group of paintings dating from 2005 to the present, brought together by the continuity of their theme, the myth of Icarus, and also by a kind of stylistic synthesis that has stabilized in recent years around a powerful form of figurative expressionism. Although he does not claim allegiance to any school, if such a notion still holds meaning today, the artist likes to modulate his pictorial approach according to his subject. At times the line becomes more precise and the forms more abstract, at others the gesture grows broader and the colors more intense. While he acknowledges a deep interest in Bacon as well as in Spanish painting, Goya, El Greco, Zurbarán, and above all Velázquez, Arturo Denarvaez paints what moves and questions him, what nourishes his reflections and his dreams, as a way of transcending lived experience. In this way, he situates himself within an exploratory approach to painting, working in series that respond to existential questions that are both contemporary and enduring.

Beyond this, the works presented here reveal the fascination he has nurtured since childhood for all that flies, birds, airplanes, and other machines. This fascination is telling when one considers what the ancient human dream of rising into the air, from Icarus to Leonardo da Vinci, holds symbolically. Arturo Denarvaez’s work has always been rooted in a reflection on levitation, elevation, the breaking free from gravity, perhaps uprooting, the transgression of norms, the act of taking flight. It is also about suspension, the in between, between earth and sky, body and soul, flesh and spirit. It inevitably involves the possibility and the risk of falling, but even more so the rebound, redemption, resurrection, the Phoenix rising from its ashes. These recurring themes in his work echo those that mark the history of humanity and the stories it tells itself, myths of transgression from the Argonauts to Sisyphus or Icarus. Representing the human condition thus appears to be a central concern for Arturo Denarvaez, humanity in its greatness and its misery, as Pascal would say, its struggle against its own condition and its inner tensions, in its beauty and its ugliness, its weaknesses and its strength, in both the sublime and the abject of which it is capable.

Arturo Denarvaez’s painting is a painting of excess, powerful, with bold and romantic chromatic harmonies, in the amplitude of the gesture, oscillating between the weight of living and the grace of existing.

Thus, the title of the exhibition, borrowed from the famous work of the philosopher Simone Weil, illustrates this constant oscillation, even if Arturo Denarvaez’s painting appears more metaphysical than religious, more embodied than spiritual. “All the natural movements of the soul are governed by laws analogous to those of material gravity. Grace alone makes an exception,” wrote Weil. There is something of this order in the painter’s work, first because the act of artistic creation is undoubtedly a form of grace, and also because Arturo Denarvaez possesses a deep awareness that from a state of grace to a fall, only a single beat of the wing may suffice.

2011
Montreuil, France

2007
Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Brussels, Belgium