Fundación La Nave Salinas is pleased to present 'Naturaleza Interior', a major exhibition of paintings by Carlos Jacanamijoy, opening on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, at the foundation’s permanent space in Ibiza and remaining on view through October 30, 2026.
Carlos Jacanamijoy’s paintings emerge from a profound relationship with color, nature, memory, and the spiritual world. Rooted in his Inga heritage and shaped by a singular pictorial language, his work transforms the natural world into an interior landscape: a place where forest, body, memory, and ancestral knowledge coexist. Through vibrant fields of color and organic forms, Jacanamijoy invites us into a cosmovision in which nature is not something observed from the outside, but a living world of which we are part.
Jacanamijoy does not paint nature from a distance; he paints from within it. The title 'Naturaleza Interior' describes both an interior landscape and a way of inhabiting the natural world. In Jacanamijoy’s paintings, conventional distinctions between observer and observed begin to dissolve as forms shift between foliage, water, animal life, celestial bodies, and pure color.
“Carlos and I met more than twenty years ago, and I have believed in and supported his practice ever since,” says Lio Malca, founder of Fundación La Nave Salinas. “We began imagining an exhibition at La Nave when the foundation first opened. More than a decade later, the stars have finally aligned.”
“Many artists have painted nature as landscape, subject matter, or object of contemplation,” says Isaac Malca, Director of Fundación La Nave Salinas. “Carlos Jacanamijoy begins from another place: in his work, nature does not appear before us as an object; it contains us. That difference transforms the gaze itself.”
Born in 1964 in Santiago, Putumayo, in the Andean-Amazonian region of southwestern Colombia, Jacanamijoy is a member of the Indigenous Inga people. His father, Don Antonio Jacanamijoy, was a highly respected Taita of the Inga people of the Sibundoy Valley, in the Putumayo region, recognized for his profound knowledge of traditional Indigenous medicine, ethnobotany, and the spiritual use of yagé, the traditional Colombian name for ayahuasca.
Carlos Jacanamijoy grew up immersed in oral traditions, healing practices, and forms of ancestral knowledge rooted in the natural world. Drawn to painting from childhood, he left for Bogotá as a young man to pursue formal studies in art. His decision to become a painter did not represent a departure from his Inga inheritance, but a way of projecting it into the field of contemporary art.
Rather than illustrating Inga culture or reducing his work to a folkloric or ethnographic reading, Jacanamijoy has developed a singular pictorial language that brings ancestral memory into dialogue with the traditions of abstraction and contemporary painting. As the artist himself has noted, his painting emerges from the sensory memory of Putumayo and the intimate experience of the studio: “I remember listening, among lights and shadows, to the cacophony of animals during an overwhelming night in the middle of the jungle.” For Jacanamijoy, the empty canvas appears as a second window, crossed by memories, dreams, and images of the forest where he grew up.
Jacanamijoy is represented by Almine Rech. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Olor a tierra' at Almine Rech in Paris and 'Ambi Yaku' at A Gentil Carioca in São Paulo, both presented in 2025. Recent group exhibitions include 'Amazonia Açu' at Americas Society in New York and 'AMAZÔNIA, Créations et futurs autochtones' at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. He is also included in 'Amazônia. Indigenous Worlds', on view at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn through August 9, 2026.
His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Korea Foundation, Seoul; the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, Oslo; the Museo de Arte Moderno de Toluca; and the Smithsonian Institution, New York. His paintings are held in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac; the Museo Nacional de Colombia; the National
