Nathalye González (1983), who signs as Jaya, is a young Colombian artist trained academically in the area of Fashion Design, a profession in which she has worked. As a visual artist, she has been dedicated full-time for two years. Jaya handles various artistic techniques such as painting, pottery, digital illustration, photography and muralism, a field in which she has taught workshops about intervention in unconventional spaces. Some of her murals are found in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Jaya worked for several years teaching art to children, for whom she feels a deep attraction and sensibility, perhaps because she has a “girl’s heart”, as she says about herself. She believes that to work with children it is necessary to become one of them and see the world through their eyes. Picasso said that “every child is an artist. The problem is how to stay a child once you’ve grown up”. Well, this Colombian artist retains that essence.

Jaya has conceived a group of small format paintings in which all that experience of working with children emerges. These compositions are made in a style that reminds us of children’s art from the stage between 9 and 12 years old. Her paintings represent portraits of adults and girls.

The portraits of adults are characterized by being flat figures, which appear in a very close-up, disproportionate, and caricatured, without many details, made without any prejudice, with great naturalness and spontaneity. The figures of the girls appear in front of a landscape, or in the rain, usually with their backs to the viewer, accompanied only by a teddy bear. They are in a contemplative mood, abstracted, solitary, but despite that atmosphere of solitude and abandonment, their compositions convey freshness, simplicity, calm, and, particularly, peace and security, symbolized in the teddy bear.

José Gregorio Noroño