Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present our new Online Viewing Room featuring eight works by Miguel Ángel Rojas (b. 1946, Colombia). A leading conceptual artist, Rojas explores subjective experience, identity, and politics, employing materials of symbolic significance and references to pop culture to give layers of meaning to his work.

A pioneer in the use of photography as an artistic medium since 1970, Rojas examines the human condition and the experience of marginality, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. Since the 1990s, his projects have often critiqued the social and political consequences of international drug trafficking and its ensuing violence. Rojas uses a sophisticated visual language, employing text, symbolic materials, and references to Pop Art and pop imagery to examine the present-day social issues caused by decades of armed conflict, political upheaval, population displacement, and environmental exploitation in Colombia.

Today Rojas lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Tate Modern, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, among many others. His solo exhibition Return to the Maloca is on view at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) through August 1, 2021. 

Rojas uses materials that acquire symbolic and historical value as coca leaves, gold and dust. While initially the coca leaves alluded to the history of indigenous life in Colombia, over time Rojas began using coca leaves to comment upon the production of cocaine for consumption in the first world. He employs symbolic materials to reconstruct pop imagery, bringing consumerism into dialogue with widespread political and social problems. 

Sed (Thirst)

Edition of 2 + 1 AP, 2015. Bronze casted, gold and mercury-plated, 1 1/8 x 7 1/2 x 3 in. each.

$50,000

"The insatiable thirst for gold has been and continues to be the source of many evils. Cultural transgressions such as the marvelous works of pre-Columbian gold which were melted down by Spanish conquistadors for shipment to Europe, and others that were similarly processed well into the twentieth century to form a major part of Colombia’s gold production industry. This thirst also resulted in massive environmental disasters, eroding the land and polluting the entire ecosystem with mercury." 

- Miguel Ángel Rojas (Translated by Michelle Suderman)

Parceros (Partners)

Ed. of 10 + 2 AP, 2007/2008. Peony seeds on rubber and aluminum, 23 19/32 x 35 13/32 in. each.

$30,000

"Parcero is a popular neologism synonymous with companion. In this assemblage, the image and materials refer both to popular thinking in which the tiger is an emblem of cunning and sagacity and to ethnic factors and urban life. The Amazonian seeds express the indigenous roots in the lower strata of society, the rubber points to the industry and the urban. In this diptych the identical feline heads are facing each other, their aggressive gestures refer to the difficult coexistence in the low-income neighborhoods of Bogotá."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas

Mola

Ed. of 3 + 2 AP, 2001. Dollar bill cut outs on paper, 19 x 27 in. 

$14,000

"Mola is the expression of one of my greatest concerns: the unjust relationships between apparently unconnected countries and communities, which nevertheless share problems that magnify the imbalances existing within them and between them. Such is the case of the chain of production and consumption of drugs: a two-way illegal trade that affects macro-communities on a worldwide scale. To address this situation, I’ve chosen symbolic-real materials such as coca leaves and dollar bills, as well as images charged with meaning. In indigenous iconography, the frog is a symbol of rain and fertility. For Mola, I used a contemporary drawing of marvelously schematized frogs that I created from tiny circular cutouts from dollar bills to refer to that other deluge of money that the drug trade receives through its activities, which have rained so many ills upon the producing nation, including the heavy sanctions imposed by foreign governments in a misguided attempt to end the problem of addiction among their own citizens."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas (Translated by Michelle Suderman)

Go On 

Ed. of 3 +2 AP, 2000. Cut coca leaf, 19 1/3 x 27 1/2 in.

$14,000

"Go On is the first image that I have done with round cutouts from coca leaves. It presents a North American icon: a cowboy from the Western movies of my childhood, who is oddly linked to the tropics through the use of coca leaves in the collage: a material that brings a new interpretation to the image, i.e. the consumer of the most dangerous alkaloids rather than the Marlboro Man."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas (Translated by Michelle Suderman)

Nowadays

Ed. of 3 + 2AP, 2005. Coca leaves on paper, 52 3/4 x 38 5/8 in.

$16,000

"Experience is the basis of my work and consequently the reality.  Living in a country under construction, with problems of all kinds, it is difficult to make art without establishing a bridge between the real world.  Since the beginning of the 1990s, I tackled the drug issue with a series of paintings, but it was in 1996 when I started working with symbolic related materials; first with coca leaves and then with dollar bills.  JUST WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES TODAY'S HOMES SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING is the title of Richard Hamilton's famous collage that gave rise to the POP movement.  

This was one of my first appropriations, I took the phrase and rewrote it with circular leaf clippings of coca to ironically answer the question posed by the English artist in the year 1956. I believe that this work, that I titled in English, NOWADAYS, addresses the drug consumerism of the first world.  It is a strong criticism to that public that consumes with Greed without thinking about the consequences that this use entails for a third world country, for which the dollars proceeds of that trade are the fuel of war."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas

Sueños de Raspachines

"This series of works is called Suenos raspachines, which are phrases written on handmade coca paper with holes. There are some terms that I consider fundamental for the development of the country and the countryside, and to solve the problem of drug trafficking, which is to give the peasant the possibility of having a decent life: land, peace, food, health, education. I translated these words to a philologist from the Nasa community, who told me: "Look, there is not a word in Nasa for peace, that's more of a concept, and the translation would be more or less like 'all united in harmony continuously.' This series has those phrases in Nasa and the Spanish translation below."

El camino corto

Diptych, Edition of 3, 2010. Cut coca leaf and dollar bills, 35 13/32 x 80 5/16 in. each.

$55,000

"The short road is a process that, contrary to its name, has been part of a reflection in recent years in which the constant line has been the crude violence that plagues the country. Not only in that Bogotá of the eighties and nineties, where the sounds of the bombs were daily, but more than all that of the perennial territories, those jungle areas conducive to the cultivation of coca that have always been the centers of conflict and in whose orbit we all revolve: the movie star who consumes coca and the drug trafficker who takes it away; the indigenous on the margins and in oblivion, who from time to time jumps onto the scene; and we, those anonymous viewers, who, as if we were behind a screen, assume everything as if it were a movie or theater scene of another.

And what better way than putting them all together. The short road is that. The fictitious place, the shortcut where each of those involved is. And yet, the voice that resonates the most is not those names on the walls written over and over again with coca leaves and dollar bills, but rather that slightly diffuse presence from behind."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas

In Gold we Trust

Edition of 2 + 1 AP, 2018. Copper, gold plated on Corian, 11 x 80 5/16 x 1 1/16 in. 

$36,000

From the series Las tablas de la ley / Tables of the Law, a subtle reference to the Ten Commandments, In Gold We Trust offers a wry critique at once of human desire and the instability of currency in the midst of social and political upheaval.

"To have more or to get more is something that has always driven human desire. And as such, it is a force that has fueled the progress of our species. But consumption has become something of an obsession within our society. Surely life without it would be more satisfying."

- Miguel Ángel Rojas (Translated by Michelle Suderman)