TOMAS SALAZAR SUAZA
Biography
Tomás Salazar Suaza, born in 2005 in Medellín, is an artist in training, passionate about various painting techniques, especially using acrylic with a spatula, which allows him maximal creative freedom. In his quest for a personal artistic language, he has embraced expressionism as a perfect ally to convey the images that spring from within. He has held over 50 exhibitions worldwide, with his works reaching cities such as Miami, New York, Sydney, Jesús María (Peru), Buenos Aires, Coatepeque (Guatemala), San Cristóbal Verapaz (Guatemala), Altea (Spain), and in Colombia: Medellín, Bogotá, Cartagena, Pereira, Armenia, Cali, and Bucaramanga.
Like many artists in training, Tomás started his career painting everyday subjects like landscapes and the human figure. This early phase helped him learn about color and composition. As he evolved, his paintings developed more mature nuances, and he began to explore abstraction and surrealism, opening a door to an inner world where fantasy knows no bounds.
From a very young age, Tomás Salazar demonstrated a profound interest and talent for art. He began his studies at the age of ten with Professor Juan Pablo González and continued his training with visual artist Betty Cárdenas. He has taken workshops with artists such as Francisco García, Filio Carmona, Pascual Ruiz Uribe, Luis Guillermo Mejía Vallejo, and Ángela Mejía Vallejo. He completed a diploma in Art History at the University of Lux, Mexico. He is currently pursuing his Fine Arts studies at Miguel Hernández University in Altea, Spain.
Tomás Salazar's artistic career took a significant leap in early 2018. At just fourteen, he began exhibiting his works in various group exhibitions across the nation, attracting the attention of art critics and collectors. Over the years, he has exhibited in numerous galleries, government institutions, and renowned museums, both nationally and internationally. His solo exhibitions have been celebrated for their innovation and artistic depth. Some of his most iconic works include "The Dream" (2018), "Female" (2019), and "Unbeaten" (2023). These pieces exemplify his journey through various artistic styles and highlight his ability to convey deep emotional and conceptual themes through his art.
The work of the artist Tomás Salazar Suaza is a conscious, sincere, self-reflective pictorial exercise, characteristic of a young and emerging creator who takes risks. Many of his images project a self-referential gesture, in a way auto-ethnographic, where he analyzes the evolution of those emotional everyday aspects that mark signs, clues, and symbols of his personal history.
In the aesthetics of his painting, interesting characters gravitate; memory, imagination, fantasy, memories, and fragments or pieces of life are constellated and interwoven in his works. Among the references to vital experiences, mirror images of love and heartbreak, or a romantic slight, emerge. Similarly, his connections with his loved ones, the pivotal moments of his life, unions, frictions, fractures, conflicts, tensions, and the baroque drama of life manifest themselves, from the effects of the figurative to the pulses of the abstract.
In his work, we see a commitment to figuration in the expressive context of ethereal atmospheres of immaterial nature in some cases, architectural in others. It is an interesting return to painting with accents and elements of the abstract, but without abandoning the structural force of drawing, the importance that some of these circumstances may have for his sensitivity translated into a very sensible iconography; in which the artist projects a poetic reflection.
The way Tomás delves into and explores the nature of his emotions, in his everyday realm, allows us to reflect on passions as expressions of thought or feeling, which are attributes of the soul. All this prompts the artist to create an expressive work related to how he analyzes or re-signifies the spiritual and emotional importance of events splattered with affections and emotions that disrupt and subvert his daily life. In his paintings, something similar happens with color and architecture, as these two compositional elements also become characters. The semantic value of color indicates that it becomes a character, a character that reveals and hides, hence its symbolic load also in color, which is poetically translated into temperatures and shades that correspond to the state of the soul.
The intensity of passions in romantic, affective, interpersonal relationships is raw material to consolidate his iconography in which Tomás decants and refines these emotions in a self-reflective way and evidences how he ponders about himself, from his interior full of ghosts, full of lights and shadows, in a constant play with life, circumstances, and chance.
The drives of life and death, of Eros and Thanatos, are also latent qualities of his pictorial exercise in which Tomás tries to be very free and uses a series of encrypted symbols that suggest reflections, feelings, and expressions. These objects of desire are reproduced in his painting amid a semantic play of tragedy and irony. Literature, his visual culture, his imagination, and his inner gaze are ingredients for his pictorial explorations. Painting allows the artist, in this case, to create an x-ray of his passions, ideas, and emotions, indeed giving them a face and an image to those passions that camouflage themselves in multiform characters.
The inner movements or moral suffering are triggers of emotional forces that permeate the pictorial language of many artists. Human passions are also part of the essence of artists; and these are reflected or expressed in manifestations of joy, sadness, melancholy, love, and hate, creation and destruction (attributes, feelings, and emotions that constitute the expressive value of many works of art throughout the history of humanity; this can precisely provide them with a series of poetic, ontological, spiritual, and transcendent values or burdens).
Notable elements in Tomás Salazar's work also include the bold use of glazes, meditation with architecture as a component that structures spaces and dimensions laden with emotion and symbolic messages. These become symbols associated with war, play, chance, and logically love, annihilation, or desolation. Love becomes a battlefield of wars and battles, triumphs, victories, and defeats (or apparent defeats). Enormous chess pieces, chessboards that function as terrains, plots, or territories, among scales, pedestals, or between columns of palaces and magical spaces are witnesses to events and mysterious phenomena, suggested, as these become unresolved conflicts entirely before our eyes.
The compositional structure often, in his works, configures an archaeology of memory, encrypted by red, blue, violet, black, white tones. A color palette that brings other temperatures to the space and adds tensions to the physical actions unfolding before our eyes. Spaces, characters, forms, and colors generate a compositional and performative dramaturgy.
The geometric and rational aspects of the represented architectural constructions (columns, arches, pyramids) contrast with the intuitive and subjective nature of the color and other sometimes sinuous forms that populate his work. The animal refers us to instinct, the buildings and their materiality to human reason. Architecture can be stony and solid, as well as metaphysical, crystalline, iridescent, transparent, diaphanous (immaterial); and that same architecture reveals or suggests, many small events and diverse beings within the painting.
The painter represents half-point arches, columns, the simultaneity of Romanesque and Gothic elements for an eclectic expression of forms. This is the symbolic and imaginary architecture of his own emotions. Buildings and ruins of an inner castle. Angular, horizontal, vertical, diagonal lines add mysticism to the work. The passions themselves are delineated by this fantastic architecture, by the territories of imagination.
Winged animals (celestial) and terrestrial, people, skulls, death, medieval knights with armor, swords, kings and queens, configure a visual alphabet, an imaginary proper to Tomás' iconography, where mysterious characters abound, evident and hidden, mythical beings. An iconographic repertoire that shows vital impressions of the painter, personal mythologies. There is also the recourse to allegory and symbolism, metaphor and metonymy; many of these elements revolve around the struggle between good and evil, catharsis and catalysts of emotions, and intense passions, the pain of his interior disrupted and subverted by life. The viewer of the paintings is invited to contemplate the materialization of powerful sensations, unnatural lightning that somewhat recalls mannerism and the color palette of El Greco. The sometimes non-representative use of color and shapes gives freedom to his pictorial expression. The unnatural chromaticism is a device of that same expression; it is a trigger for the expressive force of color. Through color, feelings are expressed, and emotions are communicated that transcend objective reality, resulting in expressive and psychological energy.
The dialogue between plastic glazes of the pictorial technique harmonizes from a collage of memories, spaces inter-dimensional that debate between anguish and calm, between pleasure and paroxysm, between catharsis or ecstasy, and serene and silent contemplation. Despite the silent and seemingly calm nature of some represented scenes, and the spatial-temporal reference in some of the scenarios depicted by Tomás, we can also meditate on dramatic scenes or in front of timeless situations. That is, there is also something ritualistic, something enigmatic that invites us to confront our own inner world.
From love and pain, from peace and war, from life and death, anguish and serenity, impotence and resilience (like the Phoenix, which rises from its ashes), the narrative of his work has an ironic component, a play of planes in space, where it seems that dream and wakefulness mix, where the most intimate emotions of the painter expand in an existential scenario, emotions suggested or hidden also under layers of meaning.
He is a painter who will not exhaust himself in speculations and reflections, but in the search for the essence of the pictorial craft, in the identity of the creator absorbed in the experience of life, amazed by the expressions of human nature. Painting allows him to reinvent, create, and recreate; fortunately, there will be time for more, there will be much time for creation and contemplation.
