José Gamarra
Museo Figari
ArtNexus, #124 (June-November 2025)

On the occasion of the 28th Figari Award—the most important recognition for visual artists in Uruguay, given by the country’s Banco Central since 1995—which he received in honor of his more than seventy years in the arts, the first floor of Museo Figari hosted an homage to the Uruguayan artist José Gamarra [1934].

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Curated by Manuel Neves, this anthology exhibition presents a summary of the various periods in Gamarra’s career, providing a succinct review of his work through a chronological trajectory across four small galleries. It is worth noting that a by then long overdue, extensive anthology exhibition was previously held at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales [MNAV] in 2023, to which the artist bequeathed 31 of his works.

 

​Two significant moments can be identified in Gamarra’s body of work: signs and jungles. All these paintings come across as familiar and readily recognizable as distinctively his. Early in his career, however, Gamarra explored the genres of portraiture and still life. In the first gallery we find a series of portraits of women, Dama en rojo [Lady in Red], Dama en azul [Lady in Blue], and Dama en gris [Lady in Gray], that evince Gamarra’s interest in Cubism [Picasso’s work made a profound impression on him], and in the schematization and geometrization of forms.

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Gamarra developed his Signos [Signs] series between 1960 and 1964. These are abstract, calligraphic signs loaded with a kind of Latin American language. Ochre and brown colors, low and somber tones, dominate his work during this period, making it almost monochrome. Gamarra arrived at this series as an evolution of the still-life genre, which mutated and gave rise to the emergence of what looked like machines with abstract and synthetic elements; in turn, those elements became signs. The series also emerged in response to the 1959 visit of the renowned Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies to Montevideo. It was then that informalism and matteric work gained a presence in the local scene, and Gamarra’s signs appeared as a kind of game. The use of oil, in combination with other powdered materials, allowed Gamarra to draw on the canvas and matter in ways that come close to writing. We can see his use of sgraffito in Pintura 64 [Painting 64], which reveals a quest for an identity and a graphism of his own.

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For this artist, a painting must have a soul and communicate an idea; otherwise, it has no reason for being. This is key throughout his production: concept and story are never absent.

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​Starting in 1964, settled definitively in France after a Brazilian sojourn, Gamarra began to develop the new language that would become the most characteristic and recognizable in his oeuvre: the jungles. In the jungle landscape, he found a space for the expression and denunciation of political and social situations in Latin America. The jungle is not his invention, but a response to the European gaze, which imbues it with a view of the Americas as ominous, exuberant, and excessive. In appropriating this image, Gamarra executes a doubly anti-imperialist action: he recaptures the image and the landscape of the jungle and subverts them to produce new meanings.

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Based on these resources, Gamarra created the personal idiom he continues to deploy. In Europe, he rediscovered color and incorporated it into his work, particularly blue and green. In this extensive set of works, the figurative aspect gives rise to a magical, symbolic narrative where each figure is associated with a specific meaning, complemented in the construction of the work’s overall meaning by all the other elements and by the context. Figures from a wide variety of historical moments coexist in these canvases: Hernán Cortés, Superman, or a military tank. In that way, Gamarra sets up a geographic and temporal dialog, or a counterpoint, that probes the history of Latin America and the dynamic of domination and insurrection that defines its relationship with the United States and Europe.

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While Gamarra’s work is straightforward, his symbolic use of figurative elements allows him to appeal to absurdity, irony, and a certain sense of humor. Similarly, the titles of his works are highly suggestive and contribute to their conceptual depth. Such is the case of A propósito de las vías de comunicación [In Connection with Communication lines] and Las tentaciones de Hernán Cortes II [The Temptations of Hernán Cortés II], which take us inside the painting’s narrative in a markedly ironic vein.

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In his paintings, Gamarra creates possible narratives in the service of political, social, economic, and environmental critique. His pictorial language is founded on the history of the continent, the indigenous condition, and a concern for the natural world. This language remains as pertinent as always for thinking about the past, the present, and even the future of our continent.