Rubén Terán Gámez is a Colombian visual artist, born in Barranquilla in 1995, the city where he lives to this day. He has had a wide, active, and prolific artistic career, participating in multiple individual and collective exhibitions, and being deserving of awards and recognitions.

Terán is a muralist and painter, virtuous in technique management. His works enjoy an extraordinary realism. The artist, through the use of intense colors and projected shadows, achieves the illusion of a 3D effect in his images, however, this is not the point of arrival, but rather a resource to make his artistic discourse more effective and powerful.

His work has two main thematic lines: the first, more playful, is related to everyday objects that have accompanied him since he was a child, such as colored pencils, marbles, copper wires, etc. These elements are arranged on the canvas imitating the shape of the Triki (Tic-tac-toe) board, a game that is called by many names, although it is played throughout America.

Regarding the second theme, the most developed and awarded by critics, he tells us “My passion for fauna and especially the marine world and aquariums are factors that have always stimulated my imagination, the magic of its inhabitants, its peculiar forms and chromatic richness have inspired me in such a way that, when making the artwork, I seek to make the viewer aware of the harmful change to which we have subjected the planet, the extinction of various species and marine ecosystems, a product of unbridled consumerism and industrial development”. In these series, the way in which, linking nature and polluting materials, visually crystallizes its message is striking. Thus, we observe the images of octopuses or jellyfishes constructed by textures that simulate plastic bags, or illustrations of corals made from copper wires.

Ana Beatriz García