En el taller (In the Workshop)

The work of Jacobo Borges (b. 1931, Caracas, Venezuela) stands out for its visual and media versatility. For more than half a century, Borges has worked in painting, drawing, film making, scenography, and installations in public spaces. A founding member of the “Taller Libre de Arte" at the end of the 1940s (with other artists such as Humberto Jaimes Sánchez), Borges has been pointed out as one of the figures who set the precedent for the creation of a new expressionist figuration that would place Latin America in the most eminent panorama of universal contemporary painting. In Borges' paintings, dissimilar, even contradictory, artistic styles coexist, mingled with symbolic recurrences such as walls, doors, and windows. The spatial ambiguity indicated by these elements refers to the idea of being in two places at the same time, the coexistence of an “inside" and an "outside." “En el taller” ("In the Workshop") pursues this double presence; an interior scene where two men chat while the viewer observes them from behind the bars of a window.