Luis Caballero (1943) was raised in a Bogotá family linked to a long line of former presidents, writers, diplomats, and military officers. However, despite the practical comfort, he would wage complex battles from an early age: a tense family relationship, an almost chronic shyness, his homosexuality in times even more hostile than the current ones, and the overwhelming certainty that he would not find in his art what he pursued. Before becoming one of the unassailable figures of Colombian art, Caballero was a solitary teenager who was deeply drawn to religion; among altars and incense he contemplated the first naked bodies, those martyrs who oscillated between agonizing pain and divine ecstasy, between death and pleasure, and who would be the beacon toward which he would steer his ships. Caballero studied at the Universidad de los Andes (1961) with Juan Antonio Roda, Luciano Jaramillo, and Marta Traba, before moving to Paris, where he met Terry Guitar, an American painter whom he married in 1966. By then, Caballero had already consolidated the initial phase of his style, influenced by artists such as Géricault, Bacon, Allen Jones, De Kooning, and de Staël. In 1968, his “Chamber of Love” won the First Ibero-American Biennial of Painting Coltejer. Over time, and once he had made his homosexuality public, those pop-toned works would gradually transform; freedom, monochromy, line, contrast, volumetry, and above all male eroticism would take over his paintings, drawings, prints, and ultimately his life.
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