"A tide that swept across the country"
BY Alejandro Manzano
September 17, 2025
Art, like tobacco smoke, travels, transforms, and leaves its mark on those who experience it. With that same mutable force, Colombian painter Tomás Salazar presented his exhibition Ocean, a project that began in Cartagena and quickly became a national tour, resonating in several of Colombia's most important cultural spaces.
The exhibition traveled to the Naval Museum of the Caribbean in Cartagena, the J. Sullivan Gallery in Cali, and the Hacienda Castilla Gallery in Pereira, tracing a route that united diverse audiences under a single creative wave.
In Ocean, Salazar unfolds what art critic José León (PhD in Art and Humanities, Valencia, Spain) describes as "an emotional cartography drawn with intuitive gestures and vibrant colors." Following his time in the Mediterranean, the artist connects his experience with the Atlantic and Pacific, creating a pictorial universe where the sea is not just a landscape, but a vital metaphor.
Each canvas is a fluid territory where the artist's hand flows freely, capturing the sea's ceaseless force and perpetual transformation. There is no rigidity in his canvases, but rather an invitation to be carried away by the current, to immerse oneself and float in a swaying of forms and colors. The work suggests that mutability is not fragility, but the very essence of life.
With Ocean, Tomás Salazar reveals a creative maturity that transcends the mere representation of the sea, transforming it into a sensory experience. His canvases are a celebration of vitality, a pictorial dance that, like the smoke of a fine cigar, invites us to pause, contemplate, and surrender.
The national tour confirms the growth of an artist who is making a solid impact on the contemporary art scene and who, with each stroke, reminds us that art is also a journey, a discovery, and a source of freedom.
