It was no accident that the key reading material for Colombia’s intelligentsia during the late 50s and early 60s was a literary journal called Mito, or myth – what the nation needed was no less than a new origin story, a narrative refounding. In the visual arts, guided by Argentine-born critic and Bogotá-based über-curator Marta Traba, the idiom of that new myth was to be geometric abstraction, which had already established a strong presence across post-war Latin America. Traba, an Argentine-born critic who arrived in Colombia in 1954 after an education in Europe, aggressively promoted abstraction through exhibition catalogs—including a text for the 1958 Bogotá exhibition “Abstract Painting in Colombia,” with work by Ramírez Villamizar—as well asarticles in the country’s major newspapers and journals, radio broadcasts and art appreciation programs on Colombia’s brand-new television system. Bogotá’s geography, wrote Traba, had conferred on it “the air of a sacred place… a ritual space.” Indeed, the cold rain of Bogotá’s nebulous highlands combined with Traba’s icy blasts of modernist purism created ideal conditions for the emergence of a singularly hermetic style of abstraction known as Colombian Constructivismo. The quasi-monastic Colombian constructivists led by Ramírez Villamizar and his contemporary Edgar Negret forged a way of making art that explicitly rejected surrealist solipsism and expressionist violence in favor of a revolutionary, autochthonous avant garde, an art for the people that was in equal parts archaic and futuristic. It was a new order they abstracted from the pre-Columbian rubble, imbibed like an Amazonian hallucinogen, reassembled and resurrected like the messianic body of a modern Inkarri and put to cosmic flight under the sci-fi sign of the Millenium Falcon. (via Front Page)“>Rhizome | Chariots of the Gods: A spaceship lands in Bogotá)