Henry Mejia Perafan, a native of the ancient cultural city of Popayan, Colombia, showed his innate disposition to the arts, especially painting, at an early age. He studied at the arts faculty of the University of Cauca, obtaining the title of Master in Visual Arts in the year 1995, where he shone for academic study and commitment to excellence.
His first exhibitions were presented as part of annual celebrations in his hometown of Popayan, and today his reputation is growing in internationally. Henry’s technique continues to evolve and entrance. He has held more than 67 exhibitions nationally and internationally, positioning himself as one of the most prominent young Latin artists of the moment.
The artist’s creative play is full of signs, color bars, spontaneous movements and accents of the spatula or brush, gestural elements and graphics, large planes of color, atmospheric qualities, transitions between natural forms (such as fish species, flora, water, waves, skies, bright dynamics, rocks, ridges and even pre-Columbian elements) and figments of the imagination. In essence the landscape structure survives despite the abstraction made to its constituent elements, becoming, an altered perceptual field of the senses: the various entities that inhabit the landscape do not abandon the traditional topographic forms but provide the viewer with ambiguous identification possibilities: syntax are poured as open to interpretation, at the risk of their freedom as it opens them to a system that prefers color, glazes, games and experimental textual elements and predictability.
The paintings evoke emotion. Movement and stillness of the forms, chromatic sensuality and gestural give us an opportunity to rediscover our experimental feelings for this land in which we live, hence the telluric visions, rooted deeply in our being, rediscover images as through a dream of mirror reflections and subliminal messages and memories.
Henry Mejia Perafán’s work has a poetic capacity to transform reality. Images are clean bright scenes, where different color intensities and atmospheresinspire us with the lyricism of lights and shadows giving us landscapes that stretch our perceptions and lead us to an imaginative, perfectly balanced land without borders.