Landscapes in metamorphosis: Alejandro Obregón, the baroque as modernity Paisagens em metamorfose: Alejandro Obregón o barroco

Abstract

This paper articulates a reading of some elements of the poetics of the painter Alejandro Obrego?n (Barcelona, 1920 - Cartagena, 1992) from the notions of landscape, subjectivity and modernity. The purpose of this reading is to think Obrego?n’s poetics as an access to consider the emergences of modernity in Colombia. This reading dialogues critically with Marta Traba’s works on the painter’s oeuvre (1994, 2005 and 2016 [1977]). In her essays, Obrego?n’s work appears as the “beginning of modern painting” in Colombia. Although Traba’s contributions are invaluable, in this essay I review two points of his reading of Obrego?n’s work with the purpose of not reintroducing the hierarchization between modernities of center and periphery from, which Latin American art is profiled as an epigonal art. On the other hand, from the theoretical contributions of Ticio Escobar, Henri Meschonnic and Santiago Castro- Go?mez, I propose to understand European philosophical, historical and aesthetic modernities as models of technical, epistemic and aesthetic rationality that postulate themselves as centers of power-knowledge that radiate their discursive effects on the colonies/peripheries, producing the mirage of a hierarchy. The idea of the baroque, as developed by Sarduy and Mabel Moran?a (following Lezama Lima), allows us to understand the emergences of modernity in Latin America as strategies of codephagy that challenge Eurocentric configurations of knowledge-power.