Kindi Llatju and art of ceremonial colors

There’s something about rivers and art. Take Renoir’s boating scenes along the Seine, Monet’s sunsets on the Thames and James Butler’s vistas of the mighty Mississippi. Water – and large quantities of it – tends to drive inspiration. Maybe, this is why Colombian artist Kindi Llajtu keeps several wooden canoes in his Bogotá studio.

Born in 1974 under the Christian name ‘Vicente’ and in the heart of an Inga community in the Putumayo, Kindi came to Bogotá to study Fine Arts at the Universidad Nacional. As one of the few members of his community to ever a formal University degree, he believed in a greater responsibility in art and was motivated to return to the Sibundoy. After participating in a yagé ritual with his tribe’s shaman, Vicente discovered his true Inga name as Kindi Llatju or  “Hummingbird Plumage.” Transformation for this artist exists at the core of identity.

In Llajtu’s studio, two wooden canoes hang from the ceiling, floating, but never touching, conveying the presence of an imaginary river. Wound in nylon and string, the canoes are a metaphor, hinting at the harmonious encounter of culture and the transforming presence of art. “They have experiences within them,” claims the indigenous artist.

The canoes capture Kindi’s view that art has a universal reach. “It comes from what the Ingas call ‘samay’, the inner quality of the shaman to understand others and the world, a quality that only comes from within”. Among the 18 canvases on display, zoomorphic shapes and human figures emerge from textures and carefully arranged layers of paint reveal the importance Kindi gives to exploring his rich ancestry and cultural heritage. By using a complex technique in which rough surfaces on a canvas are polished until smooth, intricate patterns emerge like embroidery on an Indian tapestry.

Color in Kindi’s paintings is ceremonial – and like his suspended canoes – looks to unite the spirit of the sacred with the modern. Patterns and forms are a way “to delve into our identity,” he says.

Upon returning to Bogotá, Kindi began his career as a painter astutely aware that his artistic vein was rooted in the forests and rivers of his native Putumayo. “From an early age we are visually nurtured by the arts of the community and the nature that surrounds us: the colors of woven clothes, the intricate designs of woodcarvings, the patterns in the feathers of birds” says Kindi, remembering his childhood influences. Images of rivers and cascades, water in its vertical and horizontal forms, profoundly interlaced with the Inga mythology and culture, inspired him to create a series entitled “El Rio.”

For the Inga, the river is a fertile and powerful symbol that represents life, as it takes the shape of the anaconda of their cosmological origins, but it is also a passageway to death, a connection to what is past and should not be forgotten.

Kindi experiments with natural pigments and abstract shapes. In this current series A Ojo Cerrado, – With Closed Eyes – curated by Eduardo Serrano and exhibited at La Localidad gallery this month, we appreciate an artist exploring lines and forms, without the direct association of “memory” and “identity” through a canoe, a bird, or a river. A particular absence of color in the exhibition shows an artist who can work light, through tonality and layers.

From the representation to the abstract canvas, shapes emerge which convey the importance of the “sacred” language. Background textures are often the remains of the dried layers of leftover paint; he carefully peels from paint-mixing buckets. These strips – torn and scratched – represent the layers our collective memory. Layers, which according to the artist “cannot be lost.”

Not wanting to be categorized as an Indigenista, with all the trappings of misguided stereotypes, Kindi believes that his art is anything but ‘native.’ “Sure, this work is made by a member of an indigenous group, but it is not ‘indigenista’. Though I am recovering the memory of the Inga. It ultimately is the viewer who recovers an identity.”

As one understands Kindi’s work, one enters into a play of connections. Not only to Inga culture, but also to an appreciation of tradition and memory. With “A Ojo Cerrado,” the painter shows us why he is master who can create layers of light, opening our eyes to what is around us, even when, far too often, our own perception is tinted by darkness.