In the middle of the last century, Tejada found an artistic theme that accompanied him until his last days: mangroves. These were protagonists in his production between 1995 and 1998, but first appeared in silkscreen format around 1950. Multiple events would be necessary for the mangrove to come out of paper into its final sculptural form. Around 1963, Tejada approached scenography and the production of puppets and automatons; from there came his first exhibition of wooden works, held at the La Tertulia Museum in Cali, and later taken to the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá and the Siglo XX Gallery in Quito. Thus he consolidated the continuous use of wood as a fundamental material, and began to elucidate the questioning of industrialized forms of production and the limits between art and craft. Tejada, like many of his contemporaries, turned his gaze toward the landscape, but demonstrated particular fascination with the regions of the Colombian Pacific, where he encountered the mangrove, a complex and fascinating ecosystem; around it he developed a copious production, which includes imposing sculptural figures and reliefs in small and medium formats. These pieces, which have a characteristic reddish tone, typical of polychrome cedar, are a window to the exuberant natural diversity of our country. Tejada’s works thus offer an extensive, but above all optimistic, panorama of the reality of Colombian coasts where beauty and dignity coexist in equal measure.
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