In the work of Luis Hernando Giraldo, the mountain is reiterated time and again. More than a landscape, it emerges as a recurring motif that shifts in form, color, and technique, like a familiar face through the years. This persistent return to a recognizable yet ever-transforming subject functions as a leitmotiv. For Giraldo, the San Antonio mountain in Pácora—his hometown—becomes both a mirror of memory and a symbol of his deep connection to the land and to human experience.
Born in 1946 in the Caldas region, Giraldo stands as a key figure in contemporary Colombian painting. His career as both an artist and educator has shaped generations, yet it is through his own practice that he has forged a singular voice. Often described as a “colorist of intensities,” Giraldo approaches painting as a form of writing—a sensitive register of emotions and lived passages, inscribed onto the canvas as enduring signs.
In Giraldo’s practice, the material and the poetic exist side by side. He works with oil, pastel, charcoal, ink, ash, and even lamb’s blood, pushing each medium to its limits to draw out a singular expressive force. Formally, his works move between the lyrical figuration of landscape and an abstraction that borders on the spiritual. Conceptually, he builds a language in which repetition is not redundancy but an unending search for meaning—a way of returning to the same place in order to discover it anew. For Giraldo, the mountain is never a mere topographical description; in his hands, it becomes an intimate, spiritual body, charged with memory.
One of the most powerful expressions of this pursuit was the exhibition The Mountain Tells a Story, presented at the Claustro de San Agustín of the National University, curated by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra. There, fifty-six small-format drawings were arranged like a secular Stations of the Cross: works set low and at an angle, requiring the viewer to approach them in a gesture of closeness and contemplation. As Sáez de Ibarra noted, Giraldo “has stripped everything away to arrive at pure, inexpressible intensities,” revealing the mountain as a terrain where memory, pain, and hope are inscribed.
Leitmotiv: Reiteration in the Work of Luis Hernando Giraldo takes this point of departure and expands the view. To the pieces from The Mountain Tells a Story are now added works from different stages of his career, creating a path that reveals both the coherence and the evolution of his pictorial language. This dialogue between earlier and more recent works shows how, through the repeated motif of the mountain, Giraldo has built a universe that transcends the local and opens onto the universal. Leitmotiv is, in this sense, both a tribute and an invitation: to discover how a single motif can hold the memory of an entire life, and how painting can be at once an intimate refuge, a collective testimony, and a poetic affirmation of the human experience.
