Luis Carlos Vanegas (1979), is a Colombian artist who graduated in Art Education from the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia. He has worked as a teacher in the area of visual arts and also as a cultural manager.

In Vanegas’s painting, which focuses on the human figure, there is a certain interest in the work of his countryman Luis Caballero (1943-1995), whom, undoubtedly, he has studied and put into practice his influence at the time of making some of his compositions; Vanegas has even produced works in homage to Caballero, but it is clear that he has shaped his own style, which we associate with figurative surrealism, characterized by the symbolic content, by the unconscious, irrational, strange and dreamlike, belonging to the world of dreams and nightmares.

On the basis of these studies, he has constructed a human figure with anatomical precision, which, in some cases, mutilates, fragments and metamorphoses by making one or several eyes out of its head, duplicating its arms or simply representing a fragment of the body: a hand, an eye, as a summary of the body.

His figures generally appear accompanied by a bird, a bee or a butterfly, images of symbolic content, whose relationship with the bodies and their fragments are associated with death. Vanegas’s characters are violent, punished, suffered, moving bodies, but his skillful handling of drawing, painting, stroke, stain, lights and shadows and volumes, generate a pleasant visual concert in the viewer, whose aesthetic experience alleviates the pain that bodies instill. The work of this Colombian artist embodies both horror and beauty.

José Gregorio Noroño