Alejandro Colina

Alejandro Colina (Caracas, Venezuela, February 8, 1901 - October 23, 1976) was a Venezuelan sculptor. Colina is one of the greatest exponents of Venezuelan monumental sculpture, and will frame much of his work within the cultural background of the native indigenous communities, celebrating with his sculptures the myths, legends, goddesses and chiefs of the Venezuelan ethnic groups. He died in 1976, at the age of 75. His best-known work is the Statue of María Lionza, part of the complex of the University City of Caracas.

Biography

Alejandro Colina's parents were Alejandro Torcuato Colina, born in Falcón State, and his mother Viera, a Spanish lady originally from Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He began his artistic preparation at the Academy of Fine Arts of Caracas at the age of 13, with his teachers being Antonio Herrera Toro and Cruz Álvarez García. At 17 he was working as a merchant ship mechanic, and as such, he traveled for more than a decade. In 1919, back in Caracas, he began to study at the School of Arts and Crafts of Caracas, where his works would be exhibited and he would rise to the position of deputy director of the institute.

In 1920 he decided to separate himself from Caracas society, moving to La Guajira, in the State of Zulia, where he lived with the indigenous ethnic groups of the west of the country for 8 years. Meanwhile, he will dedicate himself to taking numerous notes and studying the forms, customs and legends of the communities with which he shares. He returns to Caracas powerfully influenced by this long coexistence, from which he will extract the themes for his main works. Once back in the capital, he marries Alejandrina Issa, with whom he will have two children, Alejandro Colina and Roraima Colina.

At the end of the 1920s, Colina began to develop the Monument to the Liberator, a sculptural group to which he would dedicate much of his life and which he would never see brought to reality. Shortly after, in 1931, he worked with the Venezuelan architect Alejandro Chataing, as an assistant decorator. In 1933, the Plaza Tacarigua Sculpture Complex was inaugurated, located at the Mariscal Sucre Air Base in the city of Maracay. Between 1934 and 1935 he supervised the construction of the Monument to San Juan Bautista, a colossal commemorative sculpture of Juan the Baptist, made entirely of concrete, raised on El Calvario hill, next to the Plaza Bolívar in San Juan de los Morros. Commonly called 'Sanjuanote', it is 19.8 meters high, one of the tallest statues in Venezuela. It was built by the mandate of the then General Juan Vicente Gómez in 1933 as a present for the city when it was decreed the Capital of the Guárico State.

Colina will then be the object of rumors and intrigue, in which he is accused of being a communist. President Gómez decides to confine him in the Libertador Castle of Puerto Cabello, where he will share a cell with the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco.

Once released, the traumas of the three years of confinement force Colina to be admitted to the Caracas Psychiatric Hospital. From this stay he will be inspired for the mural 'Science and Psychiatry'. and for a series of busts in which he portrays his neighboring patients, each one representing a particular pathology.

In 1936 he remarried Emilia Heredia, who would give him three children, Aura Colina, León Colina and Luzmaya Colina. Works will follow such as the Statue of the Cacique Guacamaya, the Observation, Surveillance and Intelligence Monument located in the Military School of Caracas, and the presentation of the model of the Monument to the Liberator, on which he has worked for more than 25 years and which would be located in the top of Cerro Ávila, a mountain that dominates the entire valley of the city of Caracas.

In 1951 he created the sculpture María Lionza, a myth typical of the indigenous people of the Yaracuy state and which was transferred to the Venezuelan santero cult of María Lionza, a beautiful woman riding on a tapir. The hill of her would represent her naked and voluptuous, with wide hips and marked muscles, sitting on the tapir; the latter steps on a snake. María Lionza holds, with her arms extended towards the sky, a female pelvis, as the ultimate offering to fertility, a theme that the entire work celebrates.

At this time he also made the Bust of Negra Matea and the statues of the Caciques Tiuna, Manaure and Yaracuy.

In 1964 he concluded 'El Leandro', in San Juan de los Morros; in 1966 the statue of the Negro Primero, and in 1967 the well-known statue of the chief Caricuao, which marks the entrance to the populous residential area of the same name, west of the city of Caracas.

In 1975, shortly before dying, he left the torso of Cacique Chacao unfinished, destined for the "Plaza del Indio" in the Chacao Municipality, also in Caracas.

Work

His work is summarized in three characteristics that are necessary to consider for an understanding of Alejandro Colina's work: the indigenous theme, the monumental character and the tense and robust rhythm.

• Thematic ”Indigenist”

This aspect expresses the search for the cultural roots of America, the values of Latin American identity or specificity. Values that, in Colina's work, are embodied in characters of mythology and pre-Hispanic history, whose figures appear to have superhuman powers.

• Monumentality

The monumental character of Colina's work is determined by the need to integrate into urban spaces, in the framework of the modernization of Venezuelan cities, such as, for example, the transformation of Caracas into a metropolis. This process of transformation, initiated at the end of the centuryXIXconsolidated between the 1930s and 60th centuryXX., therefore constitutes the historical, socio-cultural and plastic-visual framework, in which the work of Colina is developed, an artist who demonstrated a complete understanding of the modern urban space and the corresponding scale.

• Ritmo, tension and robustness of shape

Colina achieved extraordinary expressivity in the handling of sculptural volumes. Their ensembles exhibit a content and tense dynamism, in which superhuman anatomy figures appear to have a force about to be triggered in a cosmic struggle. However, it should not be overlooked the presence of an eclectic combination of style elements from the “academic” sculpture, with the recomposition of pre-Hispanic motives. Perhaps this duality, deliberately managed by Colina, has not been properly understood.