This self-taught Colombian artist ended up becoming acknowledged as one of the greatest exponents of contemporary Latin-American art. Obregón rejected academicism to focus on a more personal painting.

Influenced by US culture, particularly , as well as by Picasso’s and driven by a rebellion against injustice, Obregón’s practice was enriched by the colourist language of Colombian painting. He created a highly personal vernacular which, in the early stages of his career, was known as “Magic Expressionism.” However, the initial strong cubist leaning was gradually toned down until giving way to a freer drawing.

His works are removed from any attempt at representing the real, oscillating between figuration and abstraction and always within illogical, infinite and undefined dream-like settings.

It was after his return to Colombia in 1955 following periods spent in Boston, Paris and Barcelona when he started to create his more mature painting. Barranquilla is the city from which he drew the energy to create works predicated on a social and political critique of the historical situation his country was going through. A tormented individual who had eye-witnessed murders and political uprisings, his major subject matters turned to tragedy and violence.

Around the 1970s his work started to be peopled with symbols highly representative of Latin-American, usually Colombian, culture: condors, herons, volcanoes, iguanas… although he also introduced other subjects, as in this piece, where he painted the portrait of Admiral Blas de Lezo (1689-1741), also known as Patapalo (Peg Leg) or Mediohombre (Half Man) due to the serious injuries he suffered in his many battles, that left him blind, lame and with just one arm. Perhaps it was this physical tragedy endured by one of the best strategists of the Spanish Armada, as well as Blas de Lezo’s fondness for Colombia, where he would eventually die, in Cartagena de Indias, that aroused Obregón’s enthusiasm, who even ended up borrowing Blas de Lezo’s physiognomy to paint his own self-portrait.

As this canvas shows, Obregón only works with purely painterly resources, without preparatory studies or sketches. First centred on oil painting, as from 1966 he began to use acrylic paint in his work because it gave him greater freedom to create more free-flowing, transparent and lighter works thanks to its quick drying, apart from enabling a more gestural and livelier brushstroke, an element that was crucial in achieving the vehemence on view in his works.

It was at that time when, already divested of any constructivist restrictions, he gave free rein to the expressivity of spontaneous brushwork to create scenes like the one we see in this portrait, creating an almost violent relationship between the neutral background and the figure that seems to float over it. Apparently devoid of any compositional rhythm, the space is rendered with vigorous marks that create a tension throughout the whole surface.

Obregón’s mature work boasts a more toned-down palette, usually consisting of grey, ochre, sienna, blue and black. However, in 1966 more colours began to creep into his painting, with contrasting warm and cold hues, intense and greyish ones, alternating areas rendered with a soft brushwork and others painted with enraged expressive marks. The result is a vibrant luminosity in his compositions.

All those features—the vitality, the ambiguity between abstraction and figuration, the calmness and serenity, the intensity of the red, orange or yellow tones against a greyish darkness, or the silhouette outlined against an undefined background—are visible in this portrait of Blas de Lezo, a fully mature work that provides a glimpse of the various processes the artist went through in his career.