Carlos Arturo Arbeláez Cano
Luis Fernando Arango Fernández, a Colombian painter transferred to different parts of the world and of pictorial art, heir to ancestral artistic virtues, grandson of Alberto Arango Uribe, co-founder of the School of Fine Arts of Manizales, has given a twist to his style and has entered, for some years, to reformulate the object of his work and the subjects of his inspiration.
Several galleries in the United States have shown his paintings and today, in Saint Augustine, Florida, USA, we can get closer to his work by visiting the Saint Photios National Shrine Orthodox Church and the Holy Trinity Greek Ortodox Church, where his icons hang behind the altar.
Jesus Christ
It is about a return to what were the dawn of the Renaissance in 13th century Europe, when monastic art was squeezed to rich sacred motifs and some artists such as Giotto and Cimabue (of Florentine origin) among others, began what would be a multidisciplinary movement that marked a milestone in world history by rethinking the role of man as the main actor in divine creation.
Prophet Elijah
Arango deliberately or spontaneously proposes to revive Christian art, addressing the demanding theme of icons, whose main exponents come from the Orthodox Christian Church that transcended from Rome to Greece and from there to Constantinople of the eleventh century and the Russian lands, without departing from the chiaroscuro and the hieratic motifs of the Saints, the Madonnas and the Christ, who, in the purity of the gestures, reveals all his sanctity. Since then, the presence of the Catholic Church in the European Far East (Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Serbs and Russians, among other peoples) cultivated the technique of icons with which they reaffirmed their religious beliefs and the adoption of Catholicism in its different forms and practices.
Luis Fernando drank from the sources of iconographic art as an apprentice in the monasteries of Meteora, Greece, where the tradition of meditation and the approach to God through painting is preserved. He became an iconographer, learning to prepare boards and varnishes mixed with marble dust, colored pigments extracted from precious stones such as lapis lazuli for blue, arsenic for green, charcoal for black and from roots such as of the Rubia Tintorum plant for reds. Like an alchemist in the center of silence and mystical inner recollection, like the first iconographers, feeling the presence of the Saint who is part of the liturgy in original Christianity.
Pantocrator
It reminds us again of that art of the monasteries where the perspective and the resources of light and shadow to define the volumes are barely the hint of what would happen years later with universal painting. The ancient technique of Byzantine art, in Luis Fernando’s paintings, manages to evoke the original essence of that moment of religious art, allowing us to stop along the way to meet God in a deep theological and spiritual reflection.
The use of the ancestral resources of tempera used by the panel painters of before the 13th century suggests a deep study of these techniques by the artist, and the cracking effects of the paintings, in addition to giving the painting character and an aged appearance, they also require a debugging and knowledge of modern tapping technique.
Mother of God
He uses mineral pigments, resins, oils, and includes real gold dust for the final varnish, achieving luminous finishes as the artists of the time did. Apart from everything, this work is like a return to religious art that calls for spirituality and recollection in the purity of prayer to the Supreme Creator. It is an invitation to study and understand the Holy Scriptures and to reflect on the validity of contemporary meta-discourses of ongoing globalization (call it communism, capitalism, political economy, neoliberalism, postmodernism, etc.) that modern philosophy wants to impose on the world. in the desire to locate man living in a “paradise” of compulsive consumerism or in an uncertain happiness among so many fetishes. It is the man, temporary, visceral, subjected to his true condition of Created Creature who is at the mercy of the Supreme Grace, the Cristh Pantocrator and all the iconography of the Christian tradition, begging for his clemency, asking for his favors, and given to prayer with a deep Faith in The Creator.
Luis Fernando’s paintings have been exhibited in a score of galleries on the East Coast of the United States. From Wooster, Ohio, to Key West, Florida; both in solo and group exhibitions.
Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale, Saint Augustine, where he lives and has had his workshop for more than two decades, the artist resides in the mysticism of Orthodox Christianity, producing paintings of great aesthetic and religious value. His contact is email: [email protected]
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