GUEST POST Hot Coffee with Bogota-based artist María José Chica by curator Charles Moore

Published Tuesday, May 13, 2025

(Conversation took place at: Casa Simera, Aristóteles 245, CDMX, Mexico, on 9 April, 2025 at 17:00PM)

María José Chica received her B.F.A. from the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and her M.F.A from Central Saint Martins in London, UK. She currently lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. She has taken part in both solo and group exhibitions in Bogotá, Medellín, London, Chile, and Mexico, as well as in international art fairs in Miami and Mexico City. Chica also has work included in private collections, such as, Colección Banco de la República de Colombia, Colección de Arte Davivienda, Colección Proyecto Bachué, Colección María Wills and Colección Eloísa Genish.

Through the formal and conceptual exploration of painting, her work has addressed themes of identity, systems of human relationships, but most importantly, her work delves into different ways of understanding and representing time from various perspectives; subjective, collective, geological and cosmological, among others. She is one of three artists in the show, Interlace, a three-city, three-country exhibition series featuring solo shows by Gonzalo García (CAM Galería → Kates-Ferri Projects), Salvador Jiménez-Flores (Kates-Ferri Projects → SKETCH), and María José Chica (SKETCH → CAM Galería), curated by Charles Moore.

Charles Moore: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?

María José Chica:  My favorite coffee shop is in Bogota, near my house. It's called Mistral. I like to sit outside on the terrace surrounded by these big plants. I'm sitting there feeling the wind, and I'm having, of course, an Americana.

Installation image Interlace,María José Chica April 5 - June 5, 2005, CAM Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

Installation image Interlace, María José Chica, April 5 - June 5, 2005, CAM Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

CM: I find your work often collapses linear notions of time, layering geological, historical, and cultural memory. How does Interlace—an exhibition in 3 parts, Gonzalo Garcia in NYC, Salvador Jiménez-Flores in Bogota, and you in Mexico City—as a cross-border format influence your approach to memory as both a personal and collective construct?

MJC: It's easier for me to first explain the collective way it happens. As I mentioned before, my purpose was to reflect on the collective memory we have built through imagery. This imagery comes not only from art, but also from the things we pick up from the internet, from books, and from life experiences. All of them have helped us to construct a version of history itself and a version of ourselves as people in the present. My purpose was to actually make those timelines more abstract—maybe to actually have the lines converge and somehow become more multidimensional. So I talk more about how time exists both in objects and in the layers of the earth. Each of those objects and layers has a specific timeframe that is measurable. 

I'm pretty sure archaeologists and historians have their timeframes, but for me, everything we have is in the here and now. The only time that exists for me is with the person who is talking to you at this table: now. In that moment, everything exists. Everything is present. That's to say that the collective and the personal experience coalesce and become one.

I'm part of the collective, too. It makes me conscious of my part in this long history as a tiny fragment of this moment on earth. Everything leaves behind a trace of itself, just as I'm using traces of the past, too. And that includes my paintings—if they survive over time. I’m just conscious that I exist in this point in time like this little grain of sand on this huge rock that actually contributed to the formation of the rock. How awesome that is!

Detail of installation image Interlace, María José Chica, April 5 - June 5, 2005, CAM Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

CM: And by bringing your paintings from Bogota to Mexico City, Interlace creates a dialogue between two Latin American geographies. In what ways does this geographic shift reshape or recontextualize the meaning of your materials, especially those drawn from Colombian soil?

MJC: I see it in much the same way as when you travel around the world. Your body, the space you occupy, is moving from one place to the other. Just think of it! Suddenly, from ground level, you’re sitting in a plane so high in the sky! It's incredible!

So it is with the paintings, especially with these soils I'm transporting. It's kind of surreal to think that I'm bringing a little bit of earth from my country—actually, specific spots where they come from—and then placing it in vertical format in another place. It would normally take a cataclysmic event for the soil to come naturally to this place. But now, it took just four hours with the technology of today to make this happen!

CM: And superfast at that! Fascinating!

MJC: For me, it's crazy to think that this little thing that I grabbed in my hand from somewhere else is here transformed like everything I'm talking about. I'm taking this raw material, transforming it into a painting that—who knows—in 20 years is going to be the carpet in the living room of someone I don't know, or if not, buried in the earth. It's pretty physical. And Interlace experiences that physicality, like moving one physical object to another space.

Detail, installation image Interlace, María José Chica, April 5 - June 5, 2005, CAM Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

CM: How do you form a dialogue where Latin American geographies are involved? In what way does this happen?

MJC: Well, in this case, it does take on further meaning just based on my reaction as an artist seeing how people interact with my paintings. For instance, people realize, wow, this is actually something that has this core substance, and it's here. Because in the end, the meaning behind the paintings or the underlying message would not be that different. It has more to do with the dynamics of the interaction. That reshapes the way I see my work, especially when I see its impact on different people.

Installation image Interlace, María José Chica, April 5 - June 5, 2005, CAM Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

CM: Awesome! And the last question is part of a tri-national project that includes Gonzalo Garcia and Salvador Jiménez Flores. So, how do you see your exploration of cyclical time, landscape, and cultural sedimentation in conversation with their investigations of identity, the body, and migration?

MJC: Well, I still have to learn more about Salvador's work, but what I've seen is that the three of us have derived a lot from the influence of antiquity in our own countries as well as from the world. Somehow, we have used raw materials that are very specific to our various contexts to talk about those things. Salvador uses these weaving techniques that are very traditional and culture-specific, but at the same time, he's talking about something that has influenced many cultures, like masks, ceramics, and stuff like that. Gonzales, well, he's taking in a lot of medieval sources and movies that reflect the culture of many places.

I've been doing much the same. In many ways, we have a lot of things in common that speak to our global interest. Whether at home or abroad, somehow we have the same fascination with all these multicultural influences.