2010 : Another look — Concretions on Gerardo Pacheco’s painting
I say ‒ to be ‒ I say ‒ word ‒ I say ‒ long live ‒ prior ‒ verb ‒ so ‒ dialogue ‒ logos ‒ neo ‒ open ‒ extensive ‒ sincere ‒ concise ‒ precise ‒ better ‒ dialectic ‒ deep ‒ poetic ‒ political ‒ really ‒ absolutely ‒ inhabitant ‒ dweller ‒ lucid ‒ resident ‒ playful ‒ magic ‒ Brueghel ‒ Bosco ‒ no ‒ he ‒ Gerardo ‒ wind ‒ and ‒ cloud ‒ rain ‒ and ‒ harmony ‒ tropic ‒ ombu ‒ corn ‒ and ‒ tamarind ‒ tropic ‒ wild ‒ earth ‒ mangrove swamp ‒ and ‒ sea ‒ ocean-like ‒ participant ‒ constructor ‒ lucky ‒ sky ‒ essence ‒ search ‒ to be creat-ive-ly ‒ to be ‒ always ‒ Pacheco ‒ Gerardo ‒ señor ‒ precise ‒ painter ‒ fellow countryman ‒ total ‒ he is
Mariano Casanova Valero, Valencia, España 2010

1994 : Press release
The Colombian Consulate is pleased to announce the Sample of the Colombian artist Gerardo Pacheco to be inaugurated on Tuesday, March 15, at 6 pm at the Jadite Gallery in New York.
Undoubtedly, the Master Gerardo Pacheco is one of the greatest exponents of our pictorial culture. The artist, born in Bogotá in 1942, is now a citizen of the world, as his career has developed in several European countries, United States, Venezuela and Colombia. (...)
(...) Last year, New Yorkers could appreciate his work at Infinity Art Galleries. Due to the success obtained, Gerardo Pacheco returned to New York through the front door. It is a pride for Colombia and Colombians residing in this city, to appreciate, with the public of New York, the celebrated Warriors Portraits performed by Pacheco, in oil on canvas. (...)
(...) This time, the artist will be sponsored by the Colombian Consulate and The First Bank of the Americas, for the exhibition of his work which will be open to the public until next September 30, at Jadite Gallery, located at 413 West 50 St. New York 10019.
Colombian Consulate in New York, March 1994

1990 : Painter in difficulties
If it is easy to be a plastic artist in Europe because of how uncomplicated everyday life for those engaged in this form of aesthetics, on the other hand it is difficult to be known and recognized as an artist of merit by a review that “a priori” is not used to be very fond of Latin Americans, with the exceptions that are to be assumed. In this case the Colombian Gerardo Pacheco has begun to impose a name that with no doubt will give in the near future a lot to talk about. Reputed critics such as J. Schneider, R. Calcus and Sttephan Rey, among others, have referred favorably to the work of this fellow, whom one of them (Rey) says that “reaches the spirit of the great surrealists, especially De Chirico”. Hence, on his recent exhibition in Hamburg, the newspaper art critics as important as Die Welt and Hamburger Abendblatt have referred to him in such favorably terms, as the responsibility of a work “that is made for freed from academicism modern art”.
El Tiempo, Bogotá 04-12-1990

1990 : Gerardo Pacheco
...the “seen seer”: sliding indefinitely in the in the astral weightlessness, dolls that are either sleepy or concentrated in a dream which is neither manifest nor latent suddenly open their eyes to look at the surprised visitor. Their thick reddened lips add something else to their look. The “seer” feels uncomfortable. In order to get rid of the deaf anxiety, he attempts to find out immediately what is the painter’s message. What does he want to say? Hey, Pacheco, what is the meaning of those nameless falls of blue children, of mutilated children? A metaphysical, moral or philosophical explanation, as a last resort, with discernment, would once again put things in order. The “seer” must regain his certainties, his critical spirit, and speak of technique, of the palette, of cameos, of fixated looks, and avoid to talk about canvases. You will listen to him talking about the exceptional requirement, about sobriety, about skill, about the skillful touch. He will feel liberated. No longer will he be concerned about those infinite, slow and silent falls of dismembered angels without a leg, or an arm, who are asleep or who see with eyes of a sweet and exciting depth. Motionless and in chains inside four walls, the “seer” consequently invokes the following message: So what, Pacheco, now what? Briefly it will be eighteen years that Gerardo Pacheco gives us the honor of painting close to us, in the harsh solitude to which every artist of major importance, in spite of themselves, are condemned to live because of transgression offenses. So it is that since eighteen years ago, without losing his courage (does genius have any other alternative? Isn’t it a matter of TO PAINT or TO DIE?) Pacheco uninterruptedly continues painting. His themes are the solitude of humankind, the monologue between man and woman, the radical unapproachability of human beings among themselves. This is not emptiness. It’s horrendously brutal, it can either fascinate or repel. No message, only an evidence. Do not expect a response from Pacheco, because his name could as well signify “Pas d’Echo” (Peace, in fact). Allow yourself to fall, to float, or to quickly come out, with your heart burdened with an uneasiness for your entire life.
Jacques Schneider, March 1990

1990 : Pacheco. Im Airport Hôtel Gallery. Hamburg
The Bogotano Gerardo Pacheco is not unknown in Hamburg especially for his exhibitions in the Gallery Müller-Sarmiento and the Hotel Atlantik. Gerardo Pacheco also symbolizes the bridge between two continents: America and Europe. His numerous exhibitions in Bogotá, Caracas, Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris, but also in Nice, Hamburg, Bilbao and Brussels attest to his cultural presence. Also account that Pacheco lives and paints since many years in Brussels. Critics have mentioned with great interest Pacheco’s dolls. Always they tried to classify them as striking or tried to integrate them into the experience of his youth. It may be that this interpretation does not correspond to the artist’s intention but still is a legitimate way to proceed.
The mix of impenetrable intentions and symbols consisting of concrete objects, simple, even simple objects like dolls creates an attraction and arouses the curiosity in the observer in relation to a seemingly naive and enigmatic representation.
The Man and his Symbols is called this series consisting of dolls. These are not the sweet, cute dolls that were rescued one day from the grandmother’s trunk and recall the best moments of childhood. These dolls are, despite their childlike expression, sinister. Their joints broken, their missing members, their blank faces put them away from the toy world. The human side of these dolls is rather on their lifeless expression. With a geometric accuracy the cover of the skull was removed creating an emptiness impression in the inside. Dolls look swimming in a dark space. Some critics interpreted this impression with the bodies of astronauts traveling in space. This interpretation seems light to me and does not bring the real and symbolic background.
Our search in the magic and enigmatic sense of this composition fails permanently. The only apprehended elements that connect us with reality consist of a string, a necklace, a tag like a doll bracelet, which looks more like an identifying label in the morgue. A serene, impassive cruelty dominates the scene. It is not the immense cruelty of the horse work in Picasso’s work “Guernica” or Goya’s various works. It is a delicate cruelty whose secret key is in the hands of Pacheco. The colors are sober and simple, usually limited to a few tones.
The magic and impenetrable in Pacheco’s works encourages us to try to decipher his art. This art requires an observer free from all kinds of conventions.
As one critic implies, are these dolls related to events of the artist’s own past? Or they might represent the slow but sure destruction of the child at the center of our society. Each observer develops their own relationship to the interpretation of these works.
The series of conquerors again gives the impression of an impassive cruelty, almost illusory. Here the sense of humor of Pacheco plays a very important role. The expression is clear, the conquerors are not portrayed as heroes or victors. As once said Mexican Carlos Fuentes, there are no winners but losers in the Conquest. This gallery of unfortunate lords reminds Velásquez picture “God Mars”, the god of War. Velásquez portrays and satirizes Mars as a veteran for whom victory and glory of the Spanish Empire were mere words.
Pacheco soldiers all have a huge helmet, as if he wanted to prevent any foreign idea to get into the heads. His eyes are dull and lifeless. The conqueror, that you find in your invitation, have the infant expression and a staring off of a madman.
Since many years I am studying the chroniclers and historians of the conquest of Venezuela. Courage and boldness of German and Spanish expeditions reached the edge of madness. El Dorado fever alone fails to explain the suffering they had to endure its participants. Pacheco does not exaggerate in its presentation. On the contrary, he documents that these heroic expeditions of the conquerors can also be interpreted differently.
Prof. Dr. José M. Navarro, Hamburg 1990

1988 : Pacheco’s dolls exhibited in Brussels
They are dolls that seem to float in weightlessness. They were painted by the artist from Bogotá, 46 years of age, Gerardo Pacheco, who is exhibiting in the Maison des Arts Gaston Williot, in Brussels. The artist has been living in Belgium for many years. In Brussels he is regarded as a serious and transcendental artist whose work reveals a skillful draftsman and a fine colorist. In his pictures we have admired the strict sense of architecture, the empty salons and the cupolas through which the wind circulates. Nowadays his paintings could be subconscious dreams of his past or futuristic dreams. His articulated dolls and the vacuum in which they float have a double component: on one hand, they revive our infancy; and, on the other, they incorporate in our lives the element of weightlessness that only appears in trips through space or in the walks on the surface of the moon. Pacheco had his first solo exhibition in Bogotá in 1963, and he has done a total of 26 in this Colombian capital, in Caracas and in Brussels. He has also shown his work in collective exhibition both in the United States and Europe.
El Tiempo/3B, December 1988

1988 : Pacheco: The man thrown at the air as a rag doll
         The big exibition of Antwerp.
A heavy atmosphere dominates the attractive work of the Colombian Artist Gerardo Pacheco to be seen until the 12th of june at the gallery R. Goldmuntz, Nervïersstraat, 12.
He gives us his all through paintings of dolls, not human beings of flesh and bones. Always departing from deep shadows, from a nocturnal blue to a metallic green. The pictorial transparencies create the sense of depth.
Very often these dolls are damaged, they may lack a piece of a leg. They may lie on a chair, or may look thrown on the floor, or may seem to be floating in a rarefied space. Not using exaggerations and free of pathos Pacheco guides the viewer to the heart of his composition, which intends to distress but in a controlled way!
The dolls are probably evident symbols of paranoid situations invoked here to show a dehumanized humanity. They present images of tormented and tortured human beings? Because one can’t cease to question whether they are dolls or human beings? This ambiguity permeates his paintings and it is this characteristic which lends so much intrigue to this remarkable work.
His color selection also creates a psychological impact.
His canvasses are full of disturbing references that are hallucinatory. Terror, panic, phantoms, the concrete and the unreal are all undistinguishable.
At the level of the tacit message, his work is like a kind of preaching in the desert. The importance of his pictorial ability takes priority over the content. The profundity of Pacheco’s work is indeed more important than the images. Its overwhelming look surpasses its message. What the work reflects goes farther than what it represents.
Antwerpen Stad 19 05 1988

1988 : Gerardo Pacheco at the Romi Goldmuntz gallery of Antwerp
The disquieting artist Gerardo Pacheco, born in Bogotá in 1942, is rather difficult to define because in his figurative images the unreal is evoked.  Without a doubt this Colombian is a follower of a magical realism that fills his work with an oppressive depth.  Gerardo lived in his native country and at the age of 20 started traveling frequently.  He has a studio in France but he resides in Brussels, Belgium. After having tried acrylics and not being satisfied, he tried oils and was seduced by their refinement and elegance.  The body of his coherent work has been done in oils.
In his series of paintings entitled “Remembrances Stores”, we are moved by the planned division.  Each one of the compartments evokes something about the immortal dream of infancy.  Here the color work shines with almost tropical brushwork.  In his more recent work, the masterful “Men and Symbols” series, Gerardo almost abolished such brushwork.  In alternating fashion, along the height and the width dimensions, Gerardo shows us dismembered dolls in empty space, the majority alone, but sometimes two together.  One sees these dolls on top of a chair, or fractured, on the floor.
They make you think sometimes of disjointed puppets thrown up in the air.  The dolls lack pieces, very often a leg.  They appear partially dismounted.  Here and there, there also appears a mysterious oval.  Gerardo has developed the art of the captivating composition.  One finds the doll at the height of the composition, or in the middle, or dominating in the diagonal.
Gerardo Pacheco does not rely on people of flesh and bones; he relies on dolls, which makes his vision more disquieting.
Many questions pose the viewer.  Is the image dealing with a sexless mannequin? Or is the image of a martyred, dehumanized person?  Who is the hunter and who is the prey?  The dolls offer a clue.  Pacheco uses the dolls probably as a symbol of a manipulated human being, both in concrete and imaginary terms. The viewer cannot escape really what one could call a sweet cruelty; neither escapes the tense environment exuding from this work.  Much is expressed but much more what is not expressed.  The ambiguity does not end: are they dolls or are they human beings?  It is precisely this aspect which makes Gerardo’s work so intriguing.
  In the work of Gerardo Pacheco there is not any overload.  This artist leads the viewer to the heart of the composition.  This is how one finds himself immediately, without any detours, face to face with the disconcerting purity of his theme. His very careful use of color, which relies on achieving transparency, adds a psychological reach.  Pacheco always works starting with darkness, opaque pink, orange, maroon, dark green, nocturnal blue.  Free light does not get a chance.  Thanks to his monochromatic backgrounds, Pacheco creates the impression of an unfathomable space.  What moves us most then resembles the metallic impression of a blue-green depth.
For Gerardo Pacheco, of prime importance is the pictorial quality of his work.  In second place is the content, while his message takes third place.  So detached is he from he wants to express or to suggest, that he tries in effect to give the possibility to the viewer of completing, of adding something.  This aspect cannot be underlined. The noble irradiation of the work of Gerardo Pacheco goes farther than its content; the depth of this work has more importance than its surface.
Thanks to Gerardo Pacheco, dolls in different positions become hallucinatory and impacting paintings, disquieting but, despite everything, controlled, impacting, without superficialities.  His suggestive paintings are mainly filled with disquieting hallucinations to an obsessive degree.  Horrors and phantoms are hardly separable. The paintings of Gerardo Pacheco are a form of preaching in the desert.  Nothing is clearly imposed, and one sees in the whole exhibition a very good pictorial art. 
Antwerp will not ignore his passage through there.
René Turkry (AICA), Antwerp, 1988

1987 : PACHECO/The peaceful cruelty
Do you remember the dolls of your infancy?
Do you remember those which had a porcelain head (for the wealthy) or simply made of celluloid? They were chubby-cheeked, pink and red and their big eyes would close when one put them to bed.
Those dolls —or rather the heads of those dolls— serve as the inspiration for the Colombian painter Gerardo Pacheco, who is currently exhibiting his work at the Ledoux Gallery in Namur.
To the same degree that the old dolls had, they say, a tranquilizing power and serve as a transference to a very maternal tenderness, to that same degree Pacheco’s dolls have something disturbing, sometimes really cruel.
The dolls are rarely intact. Time or somebody’s sadistic cruelty broke them...or tortured them, or silenced them by gagging them. Their eyes have been extracted violently, leaving empty orbits. Their teeth are voluntarily sharp, and their mouths very often have a grin of suffering. It takes a while to be impregnated by this very personal universe of a painter who takes the difficult path of a cruel and violent expressionism. Maybe because of having suffered a lot.
Maybe because of the fact that he is a man who has lived through a terrible adventure that he remembers.
Too modest to put human beings on the scene, he falls back on dolls on which he transfers his own sufferings.
This very beautiful exhibition, where the themes vary from cruelty to a serenity of good taste, will not leave anyone indifferent. There is a magic that works surreptitiously and jolts our sensitivity. But, isn’t it here where the success of a painter lies?
José Mepouille Vers L’avenir 1987

1970 : PACHECO (Galerie L’Ecrin)
Compositions in gray, using planes, cubes and perspective views. Sometimes spirals of pink, blue or green smoke come out of an opening in a partition wall or the roof. “An homage to Magritte”, where two halves of red discs stand out in a purple background. The work is voluntarily austere and monochromatic in an Euclidian space. Gerardo Pacheco was born in 1942 in Bogotá, Colombia, and his studio is located at 1 Montjoie Ave (1180 Brussels).
Emile Kesteman, PEAU DE SERPENT Brussels, december 1970

1970 : Visit to the Galleries
Pacheco was born in Colombia in 1942 and has been exhibiting his work since about 10 years ago mostly in Colombia and Venezuela. Today we found him in Gallery L’Ecrin (11 Rue Bergmans). His universe is obsessed with a demon which drives him to make architecture of empty cities. Working with black, white and gray scales, sometimes highlighted by a devouring red flame, the artist walks us through a labyrinth of streets at right angles but unusual nonetheless. This urban fantasia by Pacheco has affinities with surrealism. But Pacheco’s expressive movement is fenced in by the limits of fear. Claustrophobia must be one of his concerns because he is aware that in the bedrooms and in the cities that he proposes, blood and death are voluptuousnessess of a lonesome man.
Alain Viray, La Dernière Heure 1970

1970 : Gerardo Pacheco
Gerardo Pacheco is coming to us from Bogotá, Colombia, with all the vigor of his twenty-eight years and the seriousness of an authentic vocation. He has put together in the Gallery L’Ecrin a group of paintings of great sobriety, rigorous drawing, and monochromatic color. He brings us inside deserted rooms, harsh buildings, vast graves or conventional rooms. The walls, the vaults, and the coatings of the ground are gray. Certain planes are clearer than others, but all of them are always uniformly without roughness. A detailed observation gives these austere ornaments a silent and tragic grandeur, loaded with threats and cruelties. The halls, the subterranean routes, the crypts hide a potential terror from which the viewer cannot escape. Sometimes, as the only disturbance of that silence and that immobility, there come up from the cavity in the ground, or there come down from a vault, the heavy spirals of a pink smoke which add mystery to the place and uneasiness to the viewer. With simple means and with a lot of intelligence, Pacheco reaches the thought of the great surrealists, especially that of De Chirico.
Stéphane Rey, Le Phare Dimanche, 6 diciembre 1970

1969 : Gerardo Pacheco
A Colombian painter, residing in Caracas, Pacheco has dedicated his time to elucidate the way in which the essence of his work is reality itself, starting with metaphysical speculations which help him resolve the profound nature of particulars and universals. His work takes pride in temperate tones. Each work is an enclosure rarefied by mystery, a little in the style of De Chirico, partly by what the artist wants to suggest, and partly by the sustained effort to prevent emotion from being ahead of intelligence. Between both extremes lies the casuistry of an experiment that announces more searches not without surprising expressions.
Rafael Pineda, El Nacional, Caracas, 1969

1968 : Art
In “La Pinacoteca” there is now an exhibition of the works of the Colombian painter Gerardo Pacheco entitled “Spaces without a Name”. This is the third sample by this young artist who will be showing 22 of his paintings that represent something totally new in his line of artistic work. In this current exhibition one sees the abandonment of a predetermined idea in order to initiate a figurative geometric work, where aspects will be found completely different from those presented by this artist in his two previous shows in “El Pez Dorado” y the “Caracas Gallery”.
SEMANA Magazin, Nov 28, 1968

1967 : The hopeless violence in Pacheco’s exhibition.
The Violence in the Spring could be the title of the exhibition of about 30 pieces inaugurated yesterday by the Colombian painter Gerardo Pacheco. Diluted greens, very soft grays, colors that could just as well illustrate some less dramatic poetry, are the colors that Pacheco uses to denounce his country’s violence, that chronic state of violence that seems to catch the interest of Colombians as well as non-Colombians. A hopeless violence, says Pacheco, when we suggested that he give the exhibicion the title The Violence in the Spring, and that is why there is no room for the Spring. Colombia’s violence does not have a spring. But Gerardo Pacheco is not a pamphleteer. He masters drawing so that he can show the full dimension of destroyed figures or figures swollen from the solitude of a violent death; he makes poetry with his colors... Constantly the poet and the social critic meet each other to give references to each other. People were interested in the paintings of this creative being who paints things so that they be understood. To be truthful, his exhibition was not as visited as the pseudo galleries, or small markets of cheap paintings. The majority of the population still wants to see and to buy paintings of flowers of vivid colors that cannot traumatize their tranquil consciences. Gerardo Pacheco will travel to Paris in the near future. He wants to see Colombia from afar, as well as all of America. In Paris he will know a live history of art and also the most novel trends in the plastic arts.
La República, Caracas, Octubre 16, 1967

1967 : Gerardo Pacheco.
The works by Gerardo Pacheco are not complacent. His work is the dwelling place of phantoms who walk in real space, and whose world happens inside a poetic environment, where the artist achieves artistic subtleties of great beauty.
Mateo Manaure, Caracas 1967

1967 : Gerardo Pacheco
Gerardo Pacheco used to paint priests and cardinals with a line both expressive and caustic, an acidic value of broken lemon and bishop red. Now his work is clean and tidy, with desolate spaces and empty rooms.
Here something unusual could happen at any time, it seems.
Régulo Pérez, Caracas 1967