Samael Casanova Ortiz
About me
Sometimes I turn into painting, sometimes into music, and sometimes into both at once.
Samael Casanova Ortiz is a painter and violinist based in Ipiales, Nariño, in southern Colombia. He drew from childhood and painted from adolescence. There came a point when he had to choose which of the two arts to devote his life to, and he simply could not: he kept both. In his logo, the painter’s palette is a shield and the violin bow is a sword.
His work is gathered in the Spirit collection: oils on canvas made not to decorate but to transcend painting itself. He does not invent stories he has not lived. Each work comes out of a real chapter of his life — the sweetest and the most bitter — and the text accompanying every painting was written by him.
Among his references is Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, to whom he dedicated “Alternative Disruption”. And among the presences running through the collection is his mother, Magola Ortiz Vásquez, whom he lost to stomach cancer and in whose honour he keeps a series of paintings.