Leon Tovar Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Santiago Cárdenas: What We See and What Stares Back. A unique opportunity to contemplate, brought together, works by the great master Santiago Cárdenas (Bogotá, 1937), who, over more than six decades, has built an unmistakable pictorial language and profoundly influenced several generations of national and international artists.
This exhibition invites us to look at his work through a simple yet radical question: How does the image appear before us? Within that tension, between what we see and what looks back at us, lies the spectator’s experience. Rather than asking the painting to “mean” something, we suspend noise, anecdote, easy symbolism, and biography to attend to its mode of appearance.
This gesture, rooted in the phenomenology of the image, allows us to recognize that in Cárdenas’s work, objects such as blackboards, hangers, sacks, and cardboard do not illustrate a story; they present themselves as precise presences composed of light, shadow, edge, and distance. Thus, what we see names the evident (sober surfaces, balanced framing, measured light), while what stares back is the force of that appearance that arrests us, questions us, and makes us waver for an instant between object and painting.
This exhibition invites us to look at his work through a simple yet radical question: How does the image appear before us? Within that tension, between what we see and what looks back at us, lies the spectator’s experience. Rather than asking the painting to “mean” something, we suspend noise, anecdote, easy symbolism, and biography to attend to its mode of appearance.
This gesture, rooted in the phenomenology of the image, allows us to recognize that in Cárdenas’s work, objects such as blackboards, hangers, sacks, and cardboard do not illustrate a story; they present themselves as precise presences composed of light, shadow, edge, and distance. Thus, what we see names the evident (sober surfaces, balanced framing, measured light), while what stares back is the force of that appearance that arrests us, questions us, and makes us waver for an instant between object and painting.
