Abel Rodríguez

Abel Rodríguez (1944, Cahuinarí region, Colombia), or “don Abel,” as he is known, is a Nonuya sabedor [literally, “knower”], born in the Colombian Amazonian region and trained since a child to be a “namer of plants,” that is, a repository of the community’s knowledge about the various botanical species in the forest, their practical uses and their ritual importance. After spending a large part of his life in the forest, don Abel (whose Nonuya name is Mogaje Guihu, that is, “shining hawk feather”) moved to Bogotá in the early 2000s, and only then he began, without never having a formal education, to draw the forest by memory. His drawings cannot be considered only "works of art", in the current sense of that definition in Western culture. They operate first of all as a language used by don Abel to preserve and convey his knowledge.

It has been said that his drawings, more than “representing” the plants, actually “present” them: the trees and other sorts of plant life are patiently constructed on the paper, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, fruit by fruit. Moreover, the plants are almost never presented without the animals that eat their fruits and leaves, or the plants that grow around them. Thus, most of don Abel’s works constitute a faithful, precise and potentially endless portrait of the forest, that is, of an ecosystem where each element is inseparably related with everything around it. Great part of his drawings integrates more or less extensive cycles, which portrait certain ecosystems in different moments of the year and distinct phases of growing.