Tempus Meum
Tempus Meum · Joaquín Restrepo · Curator: Ana María Escallón
September 12 – November 7, 2026
Art is time without time. An image may begin with a drawing, remain in storage for years, and when the artist returns to it, it is no longer the same. The artist, who started out with an idea and returns to it only to encounter it again, finds another meaning. Nothing remains as it was. The work holds the past, present, and future within the same form.
Tempus Meum, my time, will be presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá to make the duration of creation visible. Time ascends, descends, and returns to the same place. The museum becomes a great sculpture, and, throughout the days of the exhibition, each return brings with it the difference of another time held in memory.
“Nothing that has given color to existence has yet had its story,” writes Nietzsche in The Gay Science. Love, lust, envy, piety, cruelty. Fear is there. Loss is there as well. Time to remember is the continuous time of one´s own identity.
The works of Joaquin Restrepo carry an expressive force in the human figure: a body leaning back may hold an ancient defeat; an embrace and a kiss preserve the impulse to reach out toward another being. A gesture may suggest a triptych, or a step forward. Everything points toward the connection between the individual and their world through the subject-object dialectic. The first encounters the second as it is articulated through language, through the gaze of others, and through society.
Each wall has its own color: its boundaries are drawn, but so is shared knowledge. The symbolic universe and the worldview shaped by society lay out and articulate the individual´s connection to their world. This color returns to some sculptures. Lines that run across the walls bring the cartographies of memory to life. Color becomes a spatial reference that guides the gaze, connects the works, and allows a geography of presences and absences to emerge.
At the center, bodies appear; bent, crouching, exhausted. Their hands remain behind their backs. Beneath their extremities, a crack opens, a place where the body can be passed through. The lines of color cross the void and the arms and legs stretch out, while preserving the memory of some borders. The enclosure remains in its form and becomes a path, a tension, an embrace, a possibility of passage that runs through the place.
The Ouroboros accompanies this experience. The serpent turns back upon itself; so does the visitor. Drawing, painting, digital image, and resin belong to these slow times in which form is never fixed: it changes and returns, change and start again.
Tempus Meum, my time, brings stories together. Stories of creation, of those inherited, of those lost, and of those recovered.
And we return to the void.
It was in the same place.
Time has already passed.