"My work is the result of concerns that wander through the landscape and seek to generate dialogue with the viewer from a subjective perspective. Drawing, painting, and sculpture are fundamental parts of my creative process and my individual pursuits.

The personal experience of leaving my village has become the starting point and catalyst for this process, in which Zaragoza is the contextual reference point. My exodus constitutes the turning point in my life experience, where the emotional burden of uprooting and loneliness in a context different from my own become triggers of meaning. Absence manifests itself with all its symbolic weight in these desolate landscapes."

From the discursive universe of art, landscape is conceived as a set of subjective representations of territory, to which an aesthetic-phenomenological character is attributed because it deals with the relationship of a subject with a represented or real territory.

This is what it means for Jeison Sierra to conceive of landscape as the primary identifying element that feeds his artistic creation. The artist, originally from Zaragoza, Antioquia, describes images from distant views that are abstractly associated with the landscapes of his childhood, his family history, and his return home. This is the autobiographical baggage to which his work alludes, which is an open metaphor referring to the idea of a symbolic return to Eden.

The landscape is described as follows: “The town is one of the main river ports on the Nechí River. It has hills from which you can see wide panoramic views, many rivers that form natural pools, and a swamp, all of which are part of its natural attractions.”[1].

Zaragoza today seems to be a remote place; however, it was a central settlement in alluvial gold production during the first mining cycle in Antioquia in colonial times. At that time, the activity required large concentrations of indigenous slaves, which is why mining was and is an element of population expansion and the creation of new centers of economic activity. It is said that the kings of Spain ordered a golden pineapple to be made, cast from 80 castellanos, to send to the population in gratitude for the copious amounts of precious metal that came from there. From its inception, its exploitation was surrounded by secrets, conflicts, and cycles of expansion and contraction that generated high levels of violence and dispossession.

Jeison Sierra's painting is part of the Antioquia tradition of mythical, foundational landscape painting, in which he is preceded by emblematic figures such as Francisco Antonio Cano and Pedro Nel Gómez. This is remarkable, since since the middle of the last century, the trend toward cosmopolitan urban art has relegated the genre of landscape painting to past historical trends.

Sierra's recent work introduces color in an extreme way, suggesting skies on fire, fantastic sunsets, and atmospheres charged with extreme energy. The painting seems to scream that the landscape is ending and the earth is suffering. Once again, landscape takes on relevance as a renewal of global environmental awareness has been triggered by the documentation of accelerated processes of environmental destruction, peri-urbanization, and the transformations brought about by industrialized and illegal gold mining, not only in the Andean floodplains but throughout the Amazon River ecosystem.

His new works, currently in progress, refer to the sculptural use of pressed earth as an ecological building material. His attention to the landscape and its transformations is renewed with the desert landscapes of Antioquia.

[1] https://www.puebliandoporantioquia.com.co/subregion-bajo-cauca/municipio-zaragoza/