User:Rmark1030/Alberto Goméz Goméz

Alberto Gómez Gómez (born 12 December 1956) is a figurative artist, painter and master printer. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Gómez Gómez has been a naturalized citizen of the United States since July 29, 2011. He is best known for producing monumentally scaled murals in public forums in the United States and Colombia. Additionally, his art can be found in private collections throughout the European capitals of Spain, Belgium, South Africa, Russia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. His signature style depicts people, figures, and the quotidian ephemera of daily life in surprising juxtapositions (most especially as regards the viewer's physical point of view). Though these topics are likely to be set against the backdrops of spiritual, social, philosophical, historic and political events and issues, he is just as likely to inject a whimsical sense of humor into any or all of them.

Early Life
Alberto Gómez Gómez was born the second of seven children to Luis H. Gómez (1927-2007) and Alicia Gómez (1931-1992). By far the most important influence stemming from his earliest memories, his mother was diagnosed as bipolar when he was a young boy. Of his impressions of his mother's crises, Gómez Gómez says: "'I marveled at my mother's perceptions of the world around her. For her, in her manic phases; past, present and future occupied the same mental space. Her passionate proclamations were focused, awful, beautiful, overwhelming. To bring to any piece of work that compelling sense of clarity, certainty and interrelation — that has always been my greatest challenge.'"

His secondary education began at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas (School of Fine Arts) of Universidad Distrital (District University Francisco José de Caldas of Bogotá) where he pursued a liberal arts curriculum and immersed himself in the intellectual currents of the day encompassing aesthetics, politics and the human condition by habitually attending seminars presented by Latin American and international luminaries such as Néstor García Canclini, Carlos Monsiváis, Luis Vitale, Gerardo Mosquera, Jean-François Lyotard and many others — all the while concurrently studying and working at the Atelier of Jaime Castillo. He subsequently left Bogotá for Venezuela where he continued his studies at Colegio Universitario de Caracas. While in Venezuela, he formed a seminal relationship as monitor, student (and eventually as friend) with Manuél Reyes Navarro, of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Gómez Gómez says: "Reyes was an acerbic, demanding, opinionated taskmaster to me and he was utterly without any regard for the material world. Still, he was organized in his approach, disciplined in his habits, classically trained and endlessly productive. He made it clear to me that obra, the Spanish term, translates to the English term artwork, with the emphasis on the second part of that term – work."

Career
In a career spanning nearly forty years Alberto Gómez Gómez has achieved recognition for his murals, paintings, drawings and print editions, with exhibitions throughout Latin America and the United States. His art is collected by many museums, major corporations and private collectors. He is among the most honored living artists from Latin America. In view of the nature of outdoor art pieces (which can be ephemeral, even without regard to the importance and quality of the work) it is a testament that much of his early work can still be found in highly visible places in Bogotá, New York City, Washington D.C., Miami and Orlando. In Central America his work is found in private collections in Panama and Mexico. In South America works by Gómez Gómez can be found in private collections in: Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil.

Gómez Gómez’s first exhibition took place in 1979 at Casacoima in Guanare, capital of Portuguesa State in Venezuela in a group show along with other artists from the region. From 1975 to 1981, Gómez Gómez found work in Bogotá and in Venezuela as a freelance designer, typographer, illustrator and graphic artist for various small producers of wine, perfume, fashion products and the like, eventually working to produce massive photo-litho images for Coca Cola, Pepsi Co, and others. It was in this period that Gómez Gómez fell in love with artistic process as it relates to monumentally scaled images and set about finding his own voice for his own purposes. His first one-man show was held in 1981 at the Ateneo Popular in Guanare, Venezuela. Though it was reviewed favorably, Goméz Goméz found the nascent basis for his metiér in his first prominent mural Caldas Tutelar, commissioned by the Consejo Superior (board of directors) of the Universidad Distrital of Bogotá, painted in 1987 (subsequently restored by the artist in 2013). In 1981, Gómez Gómez returned to Bogotá where he accepted positions as Professor of Art History and teacher of fine art drawing and anatomy for CIDCA (a regional college in Bogotá) for a period of twelve years. Concurrently, he conducted classes and workshops at Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Colombia in advanced color theory, textural representations in painting, anatomy and painting technique. He subsequently spent the better part of 1996 cloistered at the Archivo General de la Nación (The National Archive of Colombia) in Bogotá, conducting in-depth research on the History of Art in Colombia. His home, in recent decades, is situated equidistant from Orlando and Daytona Beach, in a largely rural section of Deltona, Florida. He has had dozens of exhibits in major cities worldwide. In 2015, he was acknowledged locally as one of the most important artists of Central Florida.

Style
Within the confines of faithfully rendered, realistic scenery, objects and portraiture, Gómez Gómez frequently establishes a unique temporal context for past, present and future (all are sometimes represented simultaneously). Often, his work depicts physical relationships between objects, people, buildings, and landscape to be inclusive of one another, or side by side, though they clearly belong to disparate time frames. In some canvases, subtly impossible points of view (which are ostensibly suggested to occupy three dimensions) are inserted into standard layouts of vanishing line perspective — in the same picture plane — in ways that can at once be convincingly real, albeit vaguely unsettling.

As well, his work often typifies self-contradictory reference to the key subject matter, e.g.; the father referred to in a title may appear in the painting as a baby boy while his children are painted as elderly and doddering; an otherwise sober and traditional old world square in a Latin American city may feature a gigantic iguana painted in a shallow depth of field (close up) in an action packed stance, poised to leap off the canvas directly at the viewer — an attitude more likely to be found in comic book scenes depicting monsters battling super heroes.

Any of these devices will be marshaled to represent political commentary, self deprecating humor, deep spiritual commitment, or all of the above, depending on the piece.

Controversy
Gómez Gómez was to find himself at odds with the public opinion, taste and morés of Central Florida at the beginning of the new millenium. His work was censured, and for a time effectively censored, due to a cultural misperception by certain Florida State Attorney's Office employees who feared that two paintings commissioned by and delivered to the Volusia County Courthouse, in Deland, Florida might be considered offensive to the public. In one painting, My Father, a depiction of an old-fashioned Colombian soldier was unaccountably thought to resemble a satanic figure. This may actually have been incited from a reaction to Day Dreamer, in which the artist copied his six-year-old nephew's drawing of a cat into the background to represent a child's imagination. This image was subsequently interpreted as an (anatomically correct) little red devil by members of the Florida State Attorney's office — instead of the completely innocent childish drawing that it actually was. The paintings were removed from the main exhibition space immediately.

The ensuing outcry in the press by staff writers, as well as a number of letters to the editor, caused the State Attorney's Office to re-examine their position on this matter and the result came in the form of a draft of new legislation bearing directly on the offices of The State of Florida concerning censorship. It had little effect as regards the display of Gómez Gómez paintings, however. They were moved to an unspecified location in the County Courthouse building said by representative of the State Attorney's office to be a "very public location," though they were not restored to their original position in the main exhibition space.

Examples of Work
Reference to Alberto's Panoramic History of Florida, Daydreamer, and others