In a modest home on the edge of Bogotá, a forest lived in exile. Its canopy no longer rustled with wind or birdcall, but was redrawn leaf by leaf from memory, with ink and conviction. It existed not on maps or in satellite imagery, but on sheets of paper, in the hand of a man who never called himself an artist.
Abel Rodríguez, or Mogaje Guihu in the Muinane language, was born sometime between 1934 and 1941 in La Chorrera, deep in the Colombian Amazon. He died in the capital on April 9th.
Rodríguez had become widely known for his exquisitely detailed drawings of Amazonian flora, now shown in museums and biennials across the world. Yet to him, the drawings were never art. They were memories made visible. They were an attempt to honor and translate a world increasingly under threat—though never fully translatable.
From his uncle, a sabedor or “man of knowledge,” Rodríguez learned the names, seasons, uses, and spirits of plants: when to harvest, which animals fed on which fruits, how the chagra—a garden borrowed from the forest—could be returned to it stronger than before. This knowledge, encoded in language and ceremony, shaped his view of the rainforest not merely as a collection of organisms but as an interwoven totality, both material and spiritual.
In the 1980s, he worked as a guide for researchers from Tropenbos, a Dutch NGO. Rodríguez could neither read nor write fluently, but he could identify hundreds of plants and recount their properties in astonishing detail. That knowledge might have remained oral if war hadn’t intervened. In the 1990s, guerrilla conflict displaced Rodríguez and his family from the Amazon. They fled to Bogotá. There, without land to plant, he began to draw.
The early works were crude, drawn with felt-tip pens. But as he began to “go to the forest in his thoughts,” the lines sharpened. The compositions grew dense with trees and vines, yet always retained breathing space—open skies, bare trunks, paths winding through green. The work was encyclopedic, not in the taxonomic sense of Linnaean science, but in the memory of cycles: floods and fruits, bird migrations and soil shifts. He knew where the scent of a flower lingered, and how long before its petals rotted.
Recognition came slowly. In 2008, the Museo Botero showed his work. In 2014, he received the Prince Claus Award. Later came invitations to Kassel, Venice, São Paulo, Gwangju. But even as collectors and curators adopted the language of art, Rodríguez resisted.
“We don’t have that concept,” he told the Museum of Modern Art in 2024. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft.”
His son, Aycoobo, now exhibits with him. But Rodríguez warned that knowledge passed down outside its place of origin is incomplete. Displaced, it withers. The Nonuya language is nearly gone. The forest he drew from memory is shrinking.
“To talk is to go around the world in thoughts and words,” he once said.
For him, drawing may have been another way of walking through the world he remembered—tracing its shapes again and again, so that it might endure a little longer.
He offered no manifestos. Asked what his work meant, he sometimes shrugged.
“Well, nothing,” he replied once. “I only show a simple image.”
But behind each line lay a more complex truth: that remembering is a form of resistance, and that a forest, even when felled, can still take root in the mind.
