María Isabel Rueda
The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía.
The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.) is a video composed of 36 35-mm slides, uncanny images that Rueda took between 2004 and 2013 in and around the ruins of “Altagracia”, the house of Colombian artist Norman Mejía (1938-2012) who, after enjoying some recognition as a painter in the 1960s, moved away from art circles and became a sort of hermit, often being deemed a “satanic painter”. Some recurring themes that appeared early on in Rueda’s practice reemerged in this project: esoteric thinking, the conceptual implications of the photographic medium, and the portrayal of herself through the image of others.
María Isabel and Norman met in the late 2000s and became unlikely friends during the last few years of his life when he would very rarely receive visitors. For her, the encounter was “necessary and non-transmissible.” She then learnt that he had built a “castle” in Puerto Colombia in the 1980s where he lived, experimenting with psychedelic substances, and painting. Coincidentally, María Isabel had started visiting Puerto Colombia, interested in photographing the ruins of a decrepit pier that had been the biggest port in the country in the first decades of the twentieth century, with a railroad reaching into the sea.
Before and after moving to Puerto Colombia, Rueda visited the ruins of the Altagracia, portraying it through photography, video and frottages of the walls, where Mejía had carved and painted erotic and otherworldly images before being threatened out of the town by local fishermen. As the structure felt apart and was slowly devoured by the surrounding flora and fauna, Rueda also surrendered to the “temptation of space”, as Roger Caillois would call the way in which certain insects mimic their surroundings which for him, rather than a survival strategy, was an aesthetic choice, a way of being and representing space simultaneously. Thus, the work is a portrait of both Mejía, and Rueda who in a play of psychological mirrors projected herself into the shapes left there by him decades ago.