Reviews 

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Alberto Gómez is often likened to modern day Michelangelo. His countless paintings, murals, drawings and prints stand apart from other painters of this day, visually, but also with the stories they tell.

Gómez’s “truth” in life is love and loss combined with hope, faith and joy. He showcases this truth in his large-scale works, baring his soul over and over again, while giving us, his audience, a glimpse into our own lives as well.

Sometimes we hear lyrics from a particular song and wonder how the songwriter knew what we were going through. This is how it feels to look upon Alberto’s work.

 

Barbara Tiffany

Curator, Crealdé School of Art

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Alberto Gómez is a living, working painter, printmaker and muralist. His story is, to grossly understate it, unusual. He has been a naturalized American citizen for nine years as of this writing in July, 2020. This is a worthy achievement, though nothing to compare with abandoning in 1997, an established and respected artistic career in Bogotá, Colombia, to forge a new path. He and his family flew to Miami, stayed briefly in West Palm, and settled into their home in Deltona. They had withstood what would be a volcanic eruption in anyone’s family life and managed it with grace.

 

Shortly after his arrival, Alberto was introduced to Tippen Davidson, the late publisher of The Daytona News Journal who would become a collector of Alberto’s work. A politically sophisticated, culturally enlightened man, Davidson’s support and promotion of Alberto Gómez would last a lifetime. The relationship was, of course, empowering; it freed Alberto to conduct a life in art in a suitably principled way.

 

Responsibility is an attitude that resounds in Alberto’s work. It is presented with clarity as for instance, in his depictions of children. That they interweave throughout his paintings as a recurring theme is obviously intentional. They appear in his work as fear and hope, creativity and wonder, and certainly, possibility and imagination. All of these potent characteristics of life are conveyed by their presence, without requiring them to be anything but children.

 

The same can be said of every human condition, each historical event, all of this artist’s visual essays, expositions, reflective musing – fancifully, every branch, twig and leaf one sees in his work declares its own existence to be indispensable. Alberto Gómez, for better and worse, presents the world to us, as he hopes will see it – it is as it is and as exact as he can make it and, inevitably, every message resolves as explosively joyous.

 

Alberto has returned recently to the panoramic format of mural painting. It was a feature of his early prominent work which began with his mural Caldas Tutelar, commissioned in Bogotá to commemorate the life of a much admired progenitor of higher education. Alberto has, over time, expanded its purview to provide for a means of cultural consciousness-raising. He is an urgent advocate for the lives of marginalized people and especially for children at risk. The mural allows him to elaborate on the distressing and the delightful in life, one topic at a time. The outcome benefits powerfully from his focused approach. Still, he declines to dwell on seemingly fashionable disillusionment, indifference to the disparities of cultural inclusion. In the art of Alberto Gómez, we still find incontrovertible certainty that affirmation can be the only way forward.

 

Richard Mark Johnson

Artist   

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