Colombian Artist López de la Ossa Maps Wounds, Wetlands, and Ground Beneath Us
In this powerful 2020 series, Joaquín López de la Ossa transforms mixed media painting into a meditation on Colombian territory, wounded memory, wetlands, and survival, creating landscapes where earth feels like skin and existence appears as motion, residue, and breath.
A Cartography Without a Map
Joaquín López de la Ossa’s 2020 series Walking the Self and the Territory begins with a refusal. It refuses the figure. It refuses the reassuring map. Instead, these paintings make the land the main protagonist. Not scenic land, not touristic land, but living ground, scored and breathing, capable of holding scars and beginnings at the same time.
The series works like a cartography without maps. No roads, no borders, no legible coordinates. Yet everything feels located. The surfaces carry the density of weather, the abrasion of travel, the sediment of lived time. Mixed media lets him build paintings that feel less like windows than like terrain samples, gathered, scraped, stained, and returned to the wall.
That bodily invitation is strongest in The Beginnings of Humanity, the large horizontal canvas that opens the sequence like a myth stripped of heroics. The title might suggest origin in some grand, elevated sense, but the painting gives us something rougher and more honest. A thick green field churns with orange flares, white speckling, mossy veils, and dark vertical presences that feel half tree, half apparition. The whole thing looks at once vegetal and cosmic.
The Earth as Wounded Skin
If The Beginnings of Humanity is the chaos before form, Between Shadow and Light feels like the cost of passage. The painting turns inward. The palette cools into gray-greens, bruised blues, muted violets, and scattered sparks of yellow, red, and orange. Near the lower center, a blue opening seems to glow from within, not like triumph, but like a pocket of breath. Around it, the surface is scratched, powdered, and clouded over, as if light had to work its way through compacted matter.
The painting’s strongest quality may be its refusal of easy contrast. Shadow and light are not opposites here. They are entangled states. One clings to the other. The earth is dense, even tired, but not inert. Tiny chromatic incidents keep pulsing through the surface like signs of stubborn life.
Shadows upon the Earth takes that same logic and intensifies it. The format remains vertical, but the energy shifts. Cool turquoise and icy blue crowd the upper sections, while lower zones thicken into dark reds, ochres, browns, and blackened traces. White and pale yellow marks flash through the center like roots, nerves, or hairline cracks across stone. The painting feels both subterranean and atmospheric. It suggests a land marked by pressure, yet still luminous from within.
What López de la Ossa does here, and does well, is make materiality carry meaning without forcing it into a literal symbol. The surface is the argument. Dense passages sit beside airy ones. Scratched lines interrupt soft veils. Color behaves like sediment, but also like memory, something deposited unevenly over time. The land is a sensitive surface that registers everything: history, weather, labor, harm, movement.
Wetlands That Breathe Back
The culmination of the series is Floodplains and Wetlands, the large diptych that again opens the field outward. Two adjoining panels hold a luminous world of pale blues, submerged greens, watery whites, floating specks, and soft eruptions of yellow, pink, and red. The seam between the canvases matters. It reads as split and connection at once, like a river channel, a scar, a hinge, or the line between inhaling and exhaling.
The notes describe the work as transforming Caribbean waters and plains into a living body that breathes, expands, and contracts. The diptych really does feel respiratory. The upper half opens into a humid light, almost milky in places, while the lower zones gather moss, shadow, vegetal density, and earth-stained greens. The atmosphere condenses, then loosens again.
Aesthetically, what is most striking is López de la Ossa’s ability to keep the wetland from becoming picturesque. There is beauty here, certainly, but it is a working beauty, unstable and vulnerable. Floodplains are fertile because they are changeable. Wetlands sustain life because they refuse hard borders
And that may be the deepest achievement of Walking the Self and the Territory.. López de la Ossa paints territory as something one walks with, not over. His surfaces hold beginnings, bruises, wetlands, and unresolved brightness.
Human beings, these paintings suggest, move through damage and still keep moving. The ground beneath them fractures and rebuilds. Hope enters through seams. The journey leaves marks. So does survival.
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