The La Nave Salinas Foundation in Ibiza is showing Naturaleza interior (Inner Nature), a solo exhibition by the Colombian painter Carlos Jacanamijoy, from 14 July to 30 October.
The exhibition is housed in the foundation’s space, a former salt warehouse in the Ses Salines Natural Park in Sant Josep.
The artist
Jacanamijoy was born in Santiago, in the Putumayo region of south-western Colombia, where the Andes meet the Amazon. His father, Antonio Jacanamijoy, was a respected taita, or spiritual leader, of the Inga people of the Sibundoy Valley.
He grew up surrounded by oral tradition, healing rituals and a deep knowledge of the forest, all of which still shape his work. Formal art training in Bogotá did not sever those roots: instead, he used it to give Inga knowledge a contemporary visual language, avoiding folklore or ethnographic cliché.
Painting from the inside
Jacanamijoy says he does not paint nature from the outside, but from within. His large canvases are full of organic forms and intense colour, blurring the line between the person looking and what is being looked at. In his work, the jungle is a living space where the body, water, animals, the stars and ancestral knowledge exist together.
The result is less a landscape to stand in front of than an environment that surrounds the viewer.
A long friendship
Lio Malca, founder of La Nave Salinas, met Jacanamijoy more than 20 years ago and has followed his career ever since. Bringing his work to Ibiza was an ambition from the beginning of the foundation’s project, and has finally been realised more than a decade later.
Isaac Malca, the foundation’s director since 2022, says what sets the artist apart is that his paintings do not present nature as an object, but envelop the audience in it.
The setting
The foundation’s building was once used to store salt from the Ses Salines pans, one of the oldest industries on the island. Its open, industrial space suits large-format work, and its location in the natural park gives the exhibition’s theme a particular resonance.
