LUIS LUNA MATIZ
My introduction to art was throughout dinosaurs. 
I became the best illustrator of dinosaurs when I was a kid in school.
I never thought I would somehow create a body of work that had so much to do with archeology or memory.
I was trained to be a doctor, for which I studied five years in a Jesuit medical school in Bogota. My aim was to be a psichiastrist like those I so much admired , Ronald Laing, David Cooper, famous for their reivindication of madness and the paradigmas of mental health.
I then discovered that to heal others you necessarily had to have a first step taken within your own Psiche which is precisely not to betray yourself.
It was then when I felt that art, for some good reason might help me in the process of living according to my ideas….which I called beliefs.
After trying hard to dissatach myself from the rigours of medical science, I slowly grew interest in abstract expressionism which I adopted as part of my life style. I am not referring to the megalomaniac painter or the tremendistic soul searching adepts….it became slowly a way of looking at the world beyond certainty. Spontaneity as a mean of being free, and trying not taking myself so seriously were parts of the puzzle.
Journeys to Usbekistan, Arizona, Amazonas from which I made a series of works assemblages, drawings on metal, and oil paintings were like always proofs of these steps . Somehow they responded to a fascination for the otherness, trying to redefine identity:. it was a game of constructing and deconstructing throughout a process. Living in Berlin during the eighties, working in different social contexts, breathing the post modern multi culturalism I decided not to indulge myself in political discourses but instead in hermetic "discourses" I always felt attracted to.
My dreams of geometric symbolism as a language (reference to TORRES GARCIA) rediscovernig precolombian design and alchemical principles in my early works slowly yielded to a more private discourse, difficult to put into words where the sole object is not enough to illustrate a sensibility or a vision. It included a permanent search for subject matters that would try to accommodate my sense of strangeness, my need of acceptance just a step ahead of what I expected from myself.That is how I somehow found a thread in this laberinth which always gives me a sign when ever I feel the work is being too obvious.
The question about which public I address, so much in vogue in NYC in the nineties, was fastly drained. After doing an MFA in Scool of Visual Arts in NYC I returned to live in a small town comuting between Villa de Leyva and Bogota. Slowly I dived into literature and my world became more a quote of lost phrases and fragmetnts of literature . Sources that included William Burroughs, Schwitters Colonial poets and writers from Colombian 17th century.
Quotation of these literatures, works of Goya, and lately Bosch, Fludd and other "possesed" minds of the middle ages reassert my tendency to a world difficult to explain. (The monk cannot find his monastery.)
Visually it is manifested in very different techniques, which include silkscreen on metal, on glass, on paper, assamblages of logs inscribed with phrases from Goya, oil paintings collaged with sown papers or rags, and digital apps that inform tha canvases are part of this eclectic sensibility which like a philosopher once said..my life consisits of being recipient of many things…
MARCH 2015
"Nomadic thinking is an inconclusive silent paradoxical thinking rich in errors and confrontations. A thinking that follows tracks without and objective other than its own intraquility and intensity."
Paolo Bianchi.
I am interested in certain aspects of perception and to awaken the state of disconcert and uncertainty in which we sometimes feel- the randomness to be found in the game- the unfixed state we are drawn to under a storm of information.
I seek acknowledgement of the relationship found in the randomness of some falling sticks and that of building a composition; to quote loosely from different sources collected on the road with no more intention than that of creating a shelter structure.
My work has evolved towards a permanent confrontation and assimilation, of issues to art history, art teaching and creating.
I was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1958. After finishing school I studied Medicine for five years in order to become a sychoanalist. In 1981 I decide to undertake a B.A. which I completed the year I left for Germany. In W. Berlin I studied at the Hochschule der Kunste, where I attended a post graduate program for artists (fachbereich 11) dealing basically with political culture, and art history. I lived there five years. During this time I traveled around Europe and the Middle East. In 1988 I went back to Colombia where I directed the Education Department at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. Together with the Ministry of Education we helped design a program for teaching art in an interdisciplinary way . I also participated in the IV Habana Bienal, III Bienal de Cuenca II Bienal de Bogotá, and traveled extensively around the country as part of a Program designed by Luis Angel Arango Banco de la Republica which consisted in inviting artists to curate a show based on the Banks Art Collection and travel across the country explaining and dictating workshops inspired by the exhibition. In 1990 I was invited by Contempora Foundation in Mexico, for an artist Residence, where I worked and traveled during 3 months in Mexico.
In 1991 I was a awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to study M.F.A at the School of Visual Arts, which I completed by June 1993. Before returning to Colombia I participated in Skowhegan Art Residence in Maine, Summer 1994. Since then I built my Studio in Villa de Leyva, on the countryside, where I I work and live commuting to Bogota frequently. In 2005 I founded together with other people a Non Profit Org. to promote cultural interchange specially among peripherical populations. We developed several art related programs which included spontaneous acting, mural painting by children and elderly, workshops with art teachers in the villages. Since apx 1998 I have concentrated my work interpreting illustrations from 19th century travelers in Nueva Granada (Colombia), quoting texts and drawings by Francisco de Goya, as well as the illustrations of La Conquista form De Bry, and literature of 16th and 17th century writers written in what would later become Colombia.
Living and working together with people coming from different backgrounds made me aware of the distinctive cultural phenomena derived from the notion of power and colonization. It also showed me these differences when interpreting issues like avant garde modernism and politics. I have based my identity in the endless game of trial and error which does not necessarily lead to a definite conclusion but somehow creates an organic approach to life, that mirrors itself in the work. Latinamerican culture has been nourished to a great extent by Spanish-European cultural forms. The information that has been transmitted has produced an ambivalent sate. On one side there is a tendency to maintain certain taboo-like structures such as the fascination towards the image; however on the other tendency has been that of suspicion towards the source.
I believe every image whether painting or sculpture is highly involved with language, and vice versa. Transcribing three dimensional space into geometric patterns, disrupting a prestablished symmetry found in an ancient cloth, quoting a text from a 16th century local literature or utilizing signs and pictographs borrowed from various cultures are important elements within my work. I am interested in the way these abstracted forms serve / served as immediate channels of communication and at the same time share some structural aspects that relate them. Combining texs, words and patterns, constructing assemblages made of several panels I find that this association of multiple surfaces indicates vectors of energy, lines of direction that recall a nomadic track. Life. The layering of planes is one amongst an innumerable set of possibilities is one amongst an innumerable set of possibilities. I am now working on a series based on the "Caprichos" from Goya. By borrowing the initial text of the etching and through a process of constructing, erasing and layering a certain structure I deconstruct the initial motive of the etching with no more reminiscence that the word or perhaps a fragment, a scratch, a sign, or a light of the initial image. This borrowing, combining in a flexible movable sometimes precarious fashion, recalls the option of the nomad that moves within undefinable places.
Together with an Israeli artist we worked installing pieces and objects of different provenience in specific places of the city.
We have made collaborative actions in Brighton Beach Spanish Harlem, and Chinatown where we construct pieces with our spontaneous response to the places. Altering the physical space by decontextualising the objects, moving and carrying them to the location as well as working with objects found and randomly chosen "insitu", recall a nomadic action which resembles aspects of our way of being. These excercises are shown as Phoptographs.
Goya, Southamerican Baroque literature, Illustrations of nineteenth century travelers in our country are leitmotivs thart I indiscriminately use cutting iron, painting landscapes, drawing and assembling.
Luis Luna–Matíz. 1995