Art tracks and perpetuates memorable and sometimes eternal Man and its struggles. After the novel and its immense ability to mirror reality, as claimed by Stendhal and achieved in such an extraordinary manner by writers in the epic field like Tolstoi or in the daily life like Flaubert, painting is the most acute and subtle form of art to approach the human nature, its essence, and its environment, in every time of world history.

From a Brueghel to a Picasso, this is epigonically demonstrated. In such perspective, every now and then there are creators that burst into the Colombian Painting scene, pushing its boundaries. This is the case of Ivan Cardona, whose first steps evidence a promising work that recreates, for instance, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man circumscribed in the clock of postmodern time, in which every hour and every minute dictate its fate, whether for good or for bad. In this same path, cold buildings, computers, e-mails, business cards or gyms constitute the new scenarios in which the contemporary existence develops itself, under horizons in which the media targets all things universal but kills all things immediate, since it can facilitate the connection with the Cyberspace but at the same time fosters the lack of communication with all things neighboring, with all things dear, even with life itself. Can loneliness and alienation kill the deep poetry of the human metaphor ? The modern language in Ivan Cardona’s works, in which the human figure preserves its sharpness in the mist of the daily abstraction, rescues for the painting the solitude of the contemporary man, who benefits from and is victim of the discoveries and goods of mankind’s most advanced age. Maybe one of the main virtues of the promising works of Ivan Cardona lies on its universal language, both Colombian and Global, because he, as a young man, lives himself alone the saga of the existence of a man who finds in art a means to claim the presence of life and either its triumph or uncertainty before all the objects created by that same man. A painter and a man who starts from these propositions, supported by an elaborate and rigorous aesthetic dimension, necessarily aims towards the future, which will also be memorable in discoveries and creative performances.

GERMÁN SANTAMARÍA