Welcome to page of Carlos Restrepo Labarrera, Colombian Artist!

charlesrestrepo@hotmail.com

 

CRITICAL COMMENTS

 
 

·        Carlos Restrepo has been devoted especially to the understanding of the logical world of the matter, he found in the indifference of the metal and his rigidity the tranquility that the objects communicate to the man that manufactures them for his own use. 

SALA GREGORIO VASQUEZ 

National library of Bogota 

14 Coastal artists 1975. 


·        Carlos Restrepo has already worked during some years the aluminum, first in relief's with a pictorial, front point of view and at the moment in openly three-dimensional representations. Their work recreates mass invariably manufactured objects and, for general rule, in exact scale of the pattern. The emphasis in the advertising image of the mentioned products, reveals relationships of its work with the Pop art; but its work doesn't go to the strong colors characteristic of the publicity and excellent in that movement. On the contrary, their mystery and attraction with the cold and metallic tone of the material (and inclusive of the serigraphy that prints them in occasions), which separates them of the reality, taking a bath them with shines and with ambiguity. Plus recently their objects have been enriched by new formal considerations in their work, for example, of balance, assembling, which supplement the importance of the material, of the creative concept and of the element humor, base manifests in its approach esthetic. 

EDUARDO SERRANO 

Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá 

II Living room Athens 1976.


·        Carlos Restrepo builds figurative relief's of aluminum in those that the simple forms of a washbowl or of a cylinder of gas he makes comfortable in a bounded ambient space and clipped.

GERMAN RUBIANO 

History of the Arte Colombian 

Salvat Tome VII. 1977.


·     Carlos  Restrepo's  work  behaves a game sociologic like unit and as group. The same lesson of their topics and of the daily objects that in their defenseless like pure and simple objects, in their paper of simple things in the utilitarian repertoire of the consumption goods and the inventory of furniture and today's men's tools, they don't seem to suspect the lists that the artist puts them to carry out as middlemen of a new communication, of a redefinition of her papers that she believes an intelligent tension between the original mission of those objects and her new work of art function. Restrepo continues faithful to its representation of some ideas that rest the load of its diverse senses in the reinvention of objects and realities, starting from objects and previous realities, reutilized or recycling the more dissimilar elements, and dedicating them to a new concept. Machetes, boots, books, tooth tubes, pencils, gloves, a game of table soccer, a horn, they are basic elements for an imagery that the case of the aluminum, it is won to pulse to the cold sheet, in what constitutes the one that alone it has value when one wants to look at the other faces of the reality from the perspective ludic of the arte. 

MIGUEL IRIARTE DIAZGRANADOS 

Apart from the Newspaper The Herald dominical 

It paginates 6-7, June 15 of 1977. 

Barranquilla.


 

·     The relief's Chair and Book, of Carlos Restrepo, they point out for their character of incomplete the three dimensions that we inhabit, they underline our scale. Indeed, the objects of Restrepo don't reach to be autonomous elements as those that look like. They are together to a bottom, annulling the dichotomy that gives the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional work: it figures against bottom. As much their books as seats are bottom and it figures at the same time. They are configured literally of the same matter. They make evident the mechanism of the representation and they become real as such, as signs. Are they three-dimensional how to not be it?. They are pieces of aluminum sheets bent in form of seats and of books, of marks and of funds. They put us and then they take us out of the game. 

HUMBERTO JUNCA AND JAIME CERON 

Book published by the Ministry of Culture June 2000 

"Investigations have more than enough Contemporary Art in Colombia" 

Project Pentagon. Materialism.


·         The nature is always there. It outlines us and we outline him questions. The landscape is still imposed, no longer exalted with incredulous eyes but queries. In Carlos Restrepo's work, a sacred place appears: Santa Marta's Sierra Nevada. Patrimonial place of our geography whose sacred is put in question by the artist by means of the multiple configuration of its image (oval boxes in metal) and its factory with a material industry. Here implicit readings emerge in the relationship reason-material, with that which Restrepo parodies the contemplative look of a place and evidence its fragility and vulnerability. There is not any sentimental load. The landscape is an object that is been enough itself. The work is the result of a continuous process of the artist's ecological activism in its region.

RAÚL CRISTANCHO

Image Regional III Library Luis Ángel Arango

October 2000 Bogotá.


 

·     There are names that can group in the measure in that together landmarks or wrought changes conjointly, giving to those to new artistic experiences, but there are also those that are their continuation without falling in continuum because they know how to proceed with personality. A thing is to remark in any event and it is that the history of the Art in Latin America, discounting some how many exceptions, it is not made of isolated personalities that group for generation and attitudes shared with not hidden uncertainty, because they agglutinate them medullary concepts. But if truth, is that there is artist that the historian can interrelate to interweave a speech, others are that are as islands impossible to agglutinate. It is the case, to begin, of Carlos Restrepo. Carlos Restrepo is a I authenticate solitary. Although it is certain that it has participated in collective exhibitions of importance carried out in Bogotá, Medellin and Cali; that have been organized with approaches rigorous curatorial, their withdrawal and sense of the silence they have not even been altered by their participation in The Union, adhesion that corresponded to the fervor of an instant in Barranquilla, when it was necessary to shake the atmosphere at local and national level. The previous explanation was necessary for that the reliefs of Restrepo are far from the emotional exaltation of Cupboards with shoes, of which was joint author, and they spread rather to be cerebral and classic. Restrepo made its first individual exhibition in 1973. The importance to the indifference of the material that the sculptor uses, since is an indifference that he goes to the hand with the indifference of the well measured and very cut object that leaves the artist's shop. Until the appearance of Restrepo, those that work with metallic sheets and especially with aluminum sheets they spread to transform into formulas Edgar Negret's discoveries. Carlos Restrepo you left the outline, beginning to prefer the presented figuration in an obvious way and to leave that the abstractionism that dominated to the Colombian sculpture. The sculptor became the main character of a new opening expression and renovation that it arrived to his climax with the Sierra Nevada's Canned works this way (1996), monumental group of thirty of loose modules conceived starting from the cans of sardines. The mark image was the pretext to manufacture identical containers to those of the original product but of more sizes, they denounce the ecological disaster to that it would be heading the solid one mountainous more high of Colombia and of the Caribbean of not stopping the aggression process and deterioration to that it is subjected for more than twenty years, when the cultivations of marijuana of its uneven topography were fumigated. Restrepo is dry and precise. 

ÁLVARO MEDINA

 El Arte of Colombian Caribbean

Book published in the 2000

Pages 70-71-72.

 

 

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