The great artist Iván Bravo is a native of La Cruz Nariño, a town located in the southwest of Colombia.
There, he began his studies always standing out in the artistic field. From a very young age he reflected his originality and cultural roots in his works. In the city of Pasto, he studied plastic arts, graduating with a degree from the University of Nariño and later as a specialist in creative pedagogy.
Later he traveled to Faenza, Italy, where he became a specialist in Stoneware-Porcelain at the Istituto Statale D’arte per la Cerámica. Throughout his professional life he has worked in the academic sphere, without leaving behind his love for art through his magnificent paintings and to date his works are found both in Colombian and European territory.
“The paintings of Master Iván Bravo that we have before us are a coven of pictorial syllables, where the symbolic and the theoretical are the expression of an ancestral heritage, deeply rooted in the subconsciousness of its author, for 11 years, converted in “potter painter”, earth, clay and history painter.
From his paintings, he recovers lost spaces for pre-Colombian ceramics, whose mystery will always remain indecipherable and from there he invites us to find the past, memories that invigorate the present and give light and meaning to the future.
His cult of the past is above all a cult of man. Today and always, here or there, perched on the rock of his destiny, man screams and his scream is a song; man dreams and his dream is a burrow of futures; man walks and his walk is a succession of footprints that weave a path that leads back to the roots; man loves and in his love he entangles his dreams and his steps in a mesh of lights and shadows, colors, fabrics, forming the chiaroscuro of his interior movement, which is history.
Iván places them on the threshold of enchantment, where dream and reality, earth and clay, present and past, man and his history are intertwined so that, in such a legitimate inquiry, the scientific significance of the discovery , like letting the secret universe of the past where this present is inscribed and ensures our destiny, penetrate and alter our own interiority and multiply, beyond the intellectual preambles, the drop of magic that still belongs to us.
Master Iván Bravo appeals to the depths of being, from the clay pot, like the womb of the ancestral mother from which we all come, it is clearly evident. It is also evident that there is nothing I can say that even remotely resembles Ivan’s work.
I have only tried to grope in the dark looking for the bottom of the ancestral vessel where our roots are. With good reason Octavio Paz said: “Going into the text - and the painting is -, is to penetrate the undergrowth and run the risk of getting lost in it.”
Dr. Clara Luz Zúñiga Ortega.
