Es · De · En

Africa

  • Oil on board
    122 x 122 cm
    Year: 1978

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    Two children in a yellow desert that makes the space in-between an unbridgeable distance. Two children sitting down, waiting for death… What’s the point of continuing to walk?
    The children don’t move… they don’t cry… they don’t scream. The observer moves on, but they continue to wait in No Man’s Land… I felt, and I continue to feel, the need to give a voice in my works to those who don’t have one, the painter has said on occasion.

  • Oil on board
    122 x 122 cm
    Year: 1983

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    The picture is so strong, so emotionally powerful, that it is upsetting to look at. A child, not just crying but screaming, from its famished and deformed body, close to other figures which are shadows converted into human beings.
    A child in Ethiopia, perhaps. or Somalia. The art critic feels the desire to name the picture Africa’s scream’ or ‘The scream of hunger’, following in the footsteps of the famous painting by Edward Munch which was called ‘The Scream’. In the case of the Norwegian painter, it was the agonised scream of an adult, from his psychological need to relieve tension: in ‘the Scream’ by Jorge Rando the figure is a child who is crying furiously in desperation at dying. Its visual impact is powerful.

  • Oil on board
    61 x 42 cm
    Year: 1981

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    Jorge Rando uses the portrait as a means of exploring the restlessness and interior of the soul. The composition is divided by a central axis in which the left side shows a certain degree of figuration and the right tends towards the abstract with a strong mixture of colours. The strong brushstrokes emphasize the facial features.

    Try covering the right side of the face with your hand, then repeat the exercise on the other side. Do they convey the same to you? Now look at the picture as a whole, the composition is maintained harmoniously.

  • Oil on board
    100 x 61 cm
    Year: 1985

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    Sudan. The civil war of the 1980s, one of the most deadly since the Second World War. The picture we are looking at features a mother with her son, her black clothing standing out against the rest of the whitish tones. It is an exodus of white and black robes in which the faces are blurred. Led by a woman whose gaze is fixed on the ground, while that of the child she is carrying in her arms is looking at the rest of the group. A painting from which pure emotions emerge, that of anguish over a destiny which has been imposed, not wanted, but one which they are forced to follow if they wish to survive.


  • Oil on board
    122 x 122 cm
    Year: 1990

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    They are not refugee camps, they are camps of the lost, the artist has said in denunciation of these camps to whom those who have lost everything except their lives are condemned. A stark representation in which the image of international society is walking away with its briefcase in its hand.

    The shadows of the observers are reflected upon the sand, safe on the other side of the fence. Are we going to remain impassive in the face of so much horror?

  • Oil on board
    122 x 122 cm
    Year: 1999

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    A space crowded with figures in which the shapes are distorted and the colours are used in a violent manner. Twisted figures, almost cadaverous, trapped between turbulent shapes of red and white strips that accompany the visceral cry of the whole.

    The faces, the open mouths already weary of screaming, resemble more a cry of resignation, a lament closer to death than to life. A desperate howl, that of those mothers who cannot stop their children crying from hunger, nor the hoarse cry of their own soul.   




  • Oil on canvas
    162 x 130 cm
    Year: 2003

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    This picture is the blank verse of Africa. The background is not yellow now, but a grey scattered with circles, perhaps, giving a glimpse something unfathomable. A soldier is leaving this scene, carrying a child in his arms in a position similar to that of the mothers of Africa. The child is not malnourished, he is wearing a tee-shirt and his face, with no features, has a bright tone. He looks at the observer, calm, a picture of security. The work dates from 2003. Is it reality or allegory?





  • Oil on paper
    91 x 91 cm
    Year: 1985

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    A woman; footsteps; red drops stain the paper. Three faces remain as witnesses outside the frame. The beauty of the breast of the woman stands out amid the grief of the composition. It is Africa. It is the beauty that wants to give life to death.
  • Oil on paper
    92 x 90 cm
    Year: 1985

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    An expression of suffering. A Christ with the crown of thorns, plunged into darkness, raises his gaze to heaven. Footsteps cross the scene, to the upper left the figure of the torturer; on the right, a face splattered with a stain of red paint. How long…?
  • Oil on paper
    92 x 90 cm
    Year: 1985

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    This impressive paper shows a chilling graveyard of skulls, in the top left hand corner an eye is awaiting the same fate, on the right hand side three faces observe… the consequences of hunger and the horror of war.
  • Oil on paper
    120 x 91 cm
    Year: 1998

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    Since the early 1970s Jorge Rando has used his Papeles de África to capture these instant moments of reality. In his work we see how the artist uses the news from a newspaper as a background and works with its message, emphasising it.

    Images and words share space in a downtrodden reality. A face looks until its features become blurred. On the paper, photographs and words… the people are dying of starvation… this is not a show.

  • Oil on paper
    100 x 91 cm
    Year: 1979

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    Goodbye to Africa? Let us not say farewell to this marvellous continent where life began. Let’s stop the exodus of desperation! Let us not leave the helpless on their own!


África is a desperate lyricism that comes from the soul and creates a language of loud colours, of dead lives and living shadows, of dramatic compositions, of battles between empty and crowded spaces.

The children cry out with hunger, mothers cry out in mourning for their living children, the exodus of misery cries out, the stark shadows cry out, this Africa abandoned to its fate cries out, this Africa that is dying and to whom nobody listens. For more than four decades Jorge Rando has immersed himself in the Somalian tragedy of the 1980s, in the eternal war of Ruanda, in the maltreatment in the Congo, in the Sudanese refugee camps… A pictorial chronicle that has been showing the voice, which is hoarse now, of the children of Africa.

The yellows, reds and blacks cry out. The ragged, energetic and living strokes cry out. The artist cries out on his canvas:

                                                                                   LOOK!


The impotence against starvation, against the horror of death, against the sterile dialogue between the trench and the weapons, before the dark eyes, black and dead eyes that never knew what a look of softness and consolation was, before this final shout of fear that shakes the soul, before this fleeing to nowhere with the music of wailing…

Jorge Rando