Lorenzo Jaramillo (1955?92) is considered one of the greatest colorists of the Neo-Figurative generation. His work as a draftsman is comparable to that of Luis Caballero (1943?95); his skill in figurative decomposition on a par with Norman Mejía (1938?2012) and Carlos Granada (b. 1933); his chromatic and pictorial rigor on the level of his teacher, Juan Antonio Roda (1921?2003), and of María de la Paz Jaramillo (b. 1948). Critic Germán Rubiano Caballero recognizes the influence of Expressionists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Rufino Tamayo on Jaramillo’s work.
Germán Rubiano Caballero (b. 1938) deems Jaramillo representative of the Neo-Expressionist movements that emerged in Europe and the United States in the seventies in opposition to Conceptualism and Minimalism. He clarifies that his text appears in the catalogue to a posthumous retrospective of Lorenzo Jaramillo’s work held at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in 1995.
In this text, Jaramillo is characterized as an artist who explored the human figure and the expressive potential of the body. Rubiano Caballero provides detailed information about the various sources that Jaramillo looked to as he constructed a visual language to which both form and content were crucial. Jaramillo’s experience in set design and his interest in dance were essential to his creative process. The power of color, line, and light in Jaramillo’s painting is patent. These formal concerns were a result of his experiences traveling abroad and of his interest in other spheres of culture like theater, film, and literature, all of which provided ideas Jaramillo materialized in his work.
According to Rubiano Caballero, Jaramillo’s great, even overwhelming, expressiveness is the product of a context of violence. The critic states “his art brings together the chaotic subjectivity innate to the modern human being and the specific hardships of a nation attempting to become modern despite a context riddled with provincialism, tradition and violence. Lorenzo Jaramillo, though, is able to go beyond any one political or national setting. With his lacerated figures and abrupt and amorphous movements, he explores the depths of pain and despair.”
An art historian, Germán Rubiano Caballero is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional of Colombia. His many publications include Escultura colombiana del siglo XX (1983), Arte de América Latina: 1981–2000 (2001), and chapters for Historia del arte colombiano, an encyclopedia published by Savat.