Encontrado en el templo de la luna

Carlos Rojas is considered one of the most influential abstract painters in the art history of Colombia and Latin America. His abstract compositions can be traced to various acts of experimentation with collage and the ideas behind early modernist painting. Flat surfaces, forms of color and the use of the line to delineate space and volume are characteristic of most of his early still-life paintings. In the 1970s Rojas developed a more metaphysical and atmospheric style inspired by both the American indigenous cultures and the Abstract Expressionists from the United States. This investigation gave rise to a series titled Amrica. All his paintings are abstract and atmospheric, formally composed of horizontal lines of color that allude to the local colors and designs in South America textiles dating from pre-Columbian eras. In his search for native values, during the 1980s, Rojas incorporated gold and silver leaf to his palette. These colors made direct reference to the major sources of wealth in colonial Latin America while responding to his own formal and aesthetic minimalistic interests.