Written by Mauiricio Lizarralde.
Maestro en artes Plasticas. U.N.
Docente de la Universidad Distrital.
A few years ago now, I seem to remember meeting an eager young man who had assembled a lot of knowledge and experience from the different people he met and all the projects he took on. A person with an integrity that I have only known in a few people, musician, dancer, artist, and all at a very mature age and, in the words of Kant, everything that he does comes from very solid and strong ethical principals.
I have since then watched him grow as a teacher, and to teach art based on his own inspiration and his own work, from his curiosity and his own inspirational searches. All these aspects combined bring out of Harold an amazing aesthetic inspiration that has allowed his pedagogical knowledge become as natural as his creative talent. Harold Boustos' artistic formation is more a result of personal effort than academic experience, this more than anything has allowed him to develop his own style, that as it evolves it leaves a distinct imprint in his work. The power of the colours, the dynamics and dramatic composition of his work, is only matched by the expressiveness of his brushstrokes, which enhances the vitality and the day-by-day theme of his artwork.
His latest work has seen him reflect the anguish of the youth massacres around the country, with a mixture of paintings with faces, screams, withered and angry hands, colours of ochre and soil, and projectiles whose trajectory determined the composition of the painting. From these he derived the landscapes of the 'marginal city' (Ciudad Bolivar), with its eroded mountains where the hangman's tree is the a silent witness, the ochre and orange of the soil and the sand, the little bit of green that's left, the everyday people, and the simple hard-fought and loved buildings; landscapes that display the strength of someone who in such harsh conditions, in a violence context, has always opted for life.
A person that once watched one of his exhibitions said that it was too violent, but that was a superficial response, because the strength of his work comes from a passionate search for beauty and truth, through a sensual form of capturing life, this takes him from the pain of a massacre or the displacement problem in the country, to the tenderness of family kitchen or children playing, it takes him through the streets of the city and their geometry, and the colour and the rhythm of urban life; overall a reality captured through the eyes and the brushstrokes of someone who has become one of the main representatives of young art.
Check out a selection of Harolds work HERE and see if you agree with Mauiricio.
