The Red Valley

"The Red Valley" is Sebastián Ruiz's most geographically specific and emotionally direct work — a painting that makes no attempt to universalize its subject or soften its particularity, that insists on the specific red earth of a specific valley in a specific region of Colombia as the most important thing in the world, which, for the duration of the painting's making and for as long as the viewer stands before it, it entirely is. The valley depicted is real — a wide agricultural valley in the department of Nariño in Colombia's southwest, a region of extraordinary natural beauty and devastating historical violence, where the red laterite earth and the deep green of the tropical vegetation create a color contrast of such intensity that it seems almost artificial, almost theatrical, until you stand in it and understand that this is simply what the world looks like in this particular place on the surface of the earth.

Sebastián spent three months living in a small village at the valley's edge before beginning the painting, making hundreds of drawings and color studies, walking the valley at every hour of the day and in every weather condition, developing the intimate, embodied knowledge of a specific place that he believes is the only honest foundation for landscape painting. The resulting canvas is his largest and most physically commanding work — nearly two meters tall and over two and a half wide — and it commands the room it is shown in with the quiet authority of something that has been very carefully, very patiently, very honestly made.

The composition is structured around the valley's characteristic visual drama: the deep red-orange of the exposed laterite earth in the foreground — a red so saturated and so particular that it seems to generate its own light, to push forward from the canvas toward the viewer with an almost aggressive chromatic energy — contrasted against the dense, deep green of the tropical vegetation covering the valley's slopes, the two colors separated by nothing more than the natural boundary of cultivation and growth. In the middle distance, small agricultural plots are visible on the valley floor — their geometric regularity, their evidence of patient human labor transforming wild land into productive ground — and the figures of farmers working them are just visible at this scale, present but not dominant, people in their landscape rather than figures posed in front of a backdrop. The sky above the valley is enormous — nearly half the canvas — and rendered in a complex, shifting range of blues and whites that suggests the particular quality of high-altitude tropical sky, close and bright and full of the possibility of sudden afternoon rain.

What elevates "The Red Valley" beyond accomplished landscape painting into something genuinely moving is what Sebastián has embedded in the image beneath its surface beauty — the knowledge, shared by anyone familiar with the history of this region, of everything this particular red earth has witnessed and absorbed. The valley was the site of significant violence during Colombia's armed conflict. The red of the earth, painted with such evident love and such extraordinary chromatic authority, carries this knowledge without stating it, asking the viewer who knows to hold both things simultaneously — the beauty and the history, the color and what has soaked into it — and the viewer who does not know to simply receive the beauty and perhaps later to seek out the knowledge that the painting, in its patient, loving attention to this specific place, has made them care enough to want. The work is held in the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá.