Threshold of Dream, Threshold of the World

From the beginning, there has been a tacit agreement between silence and color, an agreement that has allowed the artist to document that boiling of moments that surround everything we do. If painting has any validity, it is when it tries to tear that silence to delve into a composition that aims to reveal the universe to us. And when I say universe, I do not refer to that totality that moves through the stars. I think of that closed and unique world that exists in each of us. For around each individuality, there are distant constellations, suns, stars that are born and die, wandering comets, nights and days, eclipses, atmospheres, sky glows. The importance of the painter is when he manages to thread a dialogue between his silences and color. When he makes his universe explode, leaving his canvases splattered with the product of that explosion. In such a way that his paintings are stains, they become the unmistakable testimony of his individuality.

Mario Londoño's paintings are a deliberate tribute to that silence that transforms until it becomes a symphony of color. His atmospheres unify around the buried and totalizing mystery that resembles that question that always remains unanswered. It is the insoluble element that presents existence and must be the purpose of all art that aspires to be part of the great tradition.

We know that painting no longer needs to represent and that losing the third dimension and the background has left it suspended, like an eye that, instead of us observing it, mercilessly observes us; we can even affirm that Mario Londoño works on a devastatingly current line. If we take Paul Klee's famous formula of defining painting as the attempt to make visible those forces that are not yet visible, we understand the pictorial virtues of a man like Mario Londoño. His painting, constituted from a dialogue with all the currents that have nourished artistic endeavor, rises above itself to recover that monologue typical of a man who only speaks through the signs he himself produces.

And the important thing about Mario Londoño is that he has managed to define his own aesthetic field. Surrealism, figuration, the abstract pass through it, as a sign that the fundamental thing for the artist is to learn to converse with his tradition. Fulfillment, said Artaud, is the concordance between our visions and the way we crystallize them. And Mario Londoño is an artist who, through work, intuition, and discipline has managed to leave valuable moments on his canvases, placing an important part of his luminous mark. And only there, to our delight, is where the painter that exists in Mario Londoño has found his presence, his stature, nostalgia, tearing; where he has tried to elucidate that enigmatic, but fascinating pleasure that means living in the form of a human being.