Carlos Bahamon

One does not simply contemplate a painting by Carlos Bahamon, we actually enter it. We are absorbed and dropped right in the middle of the action, having to witness each individual and detail as if we were there, as if we had fallen into the middle of the scene.

Carlos portrays social gatherings and mundane situations, which are reenacted in a theatrical, almost cinematographic manner. The meticulous disposition of characters and figurants are able to create waves that make our glance flow all over the composition. It almost has a baroque touch; in a multiplicity of objects and figures that reproduce and multiply themselves throughout the canvas, making it impossible to unravel all of its content at once.

Relying on an angular geometry to place the characters, he is able to simplify and even sort people gatherings, which often tend to be randomised and even chaotic. It’s like enforcing a norm, an order among chaos.

The furthest plane is usually placed at a higher level, something that makes the action and people flow over the canvas, attaining a clear notion of fluidity and projection in space. The use of perspective is highly creative, through waves, variations and contrasts that give it rhythm and variety, sometimes even using more than one type of perspective in the same scene. The perspective is vulgarly emphasised by a wide angular distortion, which expands the space and distends the first plane in an enormous plateau.

Every single millimetre of the canvas is used, something that suddenly makes you look at the horizon and then pushes you abruptly to the first plane. A constant back-and-forth movement under a multitude of actions, opposing the inside with the outside, the nearest and the furthest.

By Pedro Boaventura • Excerpt from Masters of Painting - Volume 1

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Carlos Bahamón (Ibagué-Colombia). He practiced artistic drawing as a school hobby until he found his natural gift and decided to make art his way of life.

His formation was totally empirical and although he practiced diverse techniques such as pen drawing, charcoal and pencil , he found in the oil the best means to express itself.

From his beginnings arise various paintings inspired by daily life, the customs of rural and village life, simple in the message and the realization.

Then delving into the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age and nineteenth-century French royalists, he finds the line on which he advances until he finds his own style. So he leaves behind the primitivism and he enters in the costumbrismo with a hue close to the realism.

He is presented in Medellín-Colombia with his exhibition "Café de Colombia" with excellent results. He moves to Paris where he receives a strong European influence that inspires his works about theaters, operas, cafetines, churches and museums in which he fuses in a picture light, color, perspective and admiration for classical art.

His work has been exhibited at Galeria Got (Paris-France), GaleríaCastiglione (Paris-France), ArtBo (Bogotá-Colombia), Galería Rocha (Barbizon-France), Canapo (Carmel-California USA) and ArtExpo New York 2014, where he won first place in the official post competition.

Now he prepares a renewed version of his work "Café de Colombia", where he embodies all the essence and purity of his art.

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