Unraveling the Creative Universe of Pipe Yanguas

Writing about Pipe Yanguas is no easy task, despite the apparent simplicity, the ingenuity of his solutions, and the pragmatism with which each of his proposals seems to be resolved. A photographer, painter, muralist, and designer, he emerges as a transmedia artist not only through his use of different media and supports, but also through an aesthetic and artistic approach that brings together his life experiences and a wide variety of artistic and creative phenomena.

The son of an architect mother and a jeweler father, he spent his childhood in the idyllic surroundings of Valle del Cauca, in Cali, Colombia, and in Dresden, Germany. His studies and professional life developed in Miami, an urban, tourism, and financial center, and in Milan, Italy. These stages established a balance of interests within an entrepreneurial vocation and a commitment to service through design, photography, and works for public and private urban and architectural spaces. The communicative possibilities of design, the attraction between architecture, design, and urbanism, and the role of art as a practice and system that cuts across many areas of our lives also enabled him to place the artist's role as a cultural agent at the center of his practice. He establishes connections between individuals and existing sociocultural practices, while making his own new practices a distinctive and foundational contribution.

He is one of those artists who, without setting out to do so, exemplify particularly apt expressions of altermodernity, relational art, and the radicant artist: terms coined by curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud to discuss changes arising from artistic practices in a globalized world, both in centers of symbolic power and in the Global South.¹ These are artists capable of bringing old and new utopias into a shared vision in response to that first, “incomplete” modernity;² artists who persist in seeking a balance between individual lives and collective aspirations; and artists who, without fixed roots, can offer intellectual and artistic benefits to the regions, countries, or communities through which they move and with which they engage.

Pipe Yanguas recounts that, in early 2020, while staying at his parents' home on the banks of the Pance River in Cali, Colombia, isolated by the Covid-19 pandemic, he discovered a curious insect: the nymph of the giant mesquite bug. Its body, as though it had emerged from an astonishing abstract painting, displayed a pattern of dots and lines of extraordinary beauty. The artist keeps its photograph and proudly shows it as evidence of a sign that, in those unusual circumstances, he came to understand as a code for survival and new opportunities.

This initial structure, grounded in three basic elements, line, dot, and space, would inspire a body of work that grew in different directions and expanded in a relatively short period, encompassing both his autonomous works and his mural painting. Elementary notions of form and design became strokes, fragments, or inversions that moved from representation to deconstruction and back again. Line, dot, and space created a center of attraction and a code for constructing messages. Whites and blacks, golds and silvers, and every possible shade of the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, and their combinations adapted organically and naturally to their surroundings, connecting each time with a concrete experience of life and inhabitation.

Pipe has moved through different stages of what might be understood as a sociological analysis of the relationship between art and audiences. Through a negotiation of symbolic meaning, he creates elements of identification and cohesion among audiences as geographically distant as those of Cali, Miami, Dubai, and Havana, and within institutions such as galleries, museums, international events, and public spaces. He rigorously studies the public or private settings for which a work will be produced. Although autonomous, the work often complements architecture and exists within a habitat and the life that unfolds there. Through photography, he also maintains an ongoing record of his closest audience: friends, admirers, collectors, clients of his design office, and collaborators in the cities where he regularly works.

The photobiography, which he developed in Milan and which originated at the Istituto Europeo di Design, is one of the genres through which he celebrates and follows this international audience. It documents the unfolding of family life, a record made public only with prior consent and in which his murals and paintings may appear. These photobooks, or artist's books, can also bring together public murals from different settings or cities with their local protagonists. These individuals complement the work and add meaning to it, on the understanding that its existence is grounded in daily contact with those who experience it and reproduce it in their lives, rather than in its autonomy alone.

He likewise approaches his autonomous work, whether photography, painting, or sculpture, as part of a dialogue that connects “inside” and “outside.” It gives continuity to ideas, content, and solutions that remain connected through the visibility and social legitimacy his practice has achieved. Even when one type of work seems to separate from another, a shared code holds them together, transcending both style and their public or private existence. That code is a belief in an existence built on shared agreement, arising from the artist's own philosophy of life and grounded in exchanges that radiate toward new forms of coexistence.

Pipe is also an entrepreneur in his own right. Familiar with marketing and advertising techniques, he spares neither effort nor time, working intensively across different approaches and development strategies. These, too, draw on the entrepreneurial dimension of his practice and on an expanded understanding of design and communication within culture. His cosmopolitan potential similarly emerges from the processes and strategies in which his work is engaged. Here, aesthetic value remains central, rather than receding into the background as it often does in other expressions of collaborative and participatory art.

The work's aesthetic sensibility and the premises from which it is articulated are part of its success in engaging contemporary audiences. They allow him to achieve an increasing resonance as he seeks new audiences and conditions for new interactions. The tendency toward abstraction, a fundamental element in the development of his compositions of lines and dots, becomes readily understandable images and narratives within an interconnected, yet paradoxically increasingly fragmented, world. A visual code drawn from nature and adopted as the foundation of artistic practice is itself a powerful root. It creates synergies through references, images, and symbols with a universal, or global, orientation that the artist strives to sustain. Meanwhile, the artwork's role as a mediator of immersive and transformative experiences and dynamics within the artistic act itself lays the groundwork for an embrace, albeit a partial one, of the mobilizing potential of aesthetics.

For the public project Acera Sur – Detrás del Muro at the 15th Havana Biennial, Pipe chose a setting with a particularly distinctive character. On one side stands the sidewalk of the Deauville, a pleasant, modest hotel in the capital that, despite the passing years, retains its façade of arcades, columns, and glass. It invites people inside and allows them, from within, to see everything happening outside. On the other side, at the same corner of Galiano and Malecón, stands Primavera, the controversial and never overlooked monumental head by Cuban sculptor Rafael Miranda San Juan. Its beauty, seemingly outside its own time, confronts us with the enduring idea of rebirth. Behind it is a wall marked by irregularities, wear, and graffiti, upon which the artist embarks on a new visual adventure. Greens, yellows, and blacks trace an eloquent landscape: a sunrise, or perhaps a sunset, that mirrors the one we see each day beyond the Malecón wall, far out over the sea.

This setting is fundamental when we consider the quality inherent in art understood as autonomous, whose references are confined to its own conditions. Here, that status is transgressed. By choosing one of the potentially most contaminated areas of the “acera sur,” or southern sidewalk, and opening it to readings, profanations, and interweavings that engage with the city's multiple, heterodox character, he turns the city itself into content. This enriches his proposal as a call for civic participation.

Here, Pipe does not invoke the purist spirit of the murals made in the homes and studios of friends and clients. He becomes intoxicated by the spirit of the city and accepts the potentially temporary, unfinished nature of a work subject to future shifts and circumstances. Texts such as “bravo,” “cartas q quemé” (letters I burned), “crónicas” (chronicles), “apocalipsis” (apocalypse), “runaway,” and “toy casi muerto” (I'm almost dead) allow individuals carrying these disparate experiences to speak through him. He photographs some of them as a record of the exchange of energies, of collaboration, and of new and potential meanings.

A second work, Hemoglobina, transformed the reference to red blood cells into an installation of three cubes of the same hue, pierced with dots and lines that let the city's color and oxygen show through and breathe. Yet, placed on the same southern sidewalk, they entered into a different dialogue of challenge with the galleries or covered spaces of the imposing Paseo del Prado hotel. Although the work's original meaning may have responded to other considerations and intentions, positioned at the edges of its arcades, these three cubes asserted themselves against the possibility of remaining detached and insignificant before the tourist behemoth. They exposed its complete lack of a “blood” connection with the city. Both cases offer distinct and significant examples of interconnection and of the role of audiences and spaces as bearers of meaning, which the artist must consider and activate when developing the strategies of his work.

In conclusion, Pipe Yanguas's work responds to an artistic paradigm that is at once endogenous and exogenous. Its capacity to enter the dynamics of everyday life reveals a humanistic vision rooted in the flows and complexities of daily existence. Its potential, however, lies in giving expression to, interpreting, and fulfilling dreams and desires; in seeking and attaining joy and brief moments of personal realization; and in the necessary outward expression of subjective experience, through which art's emancipatory power can be recovered.