The painter, brother of journalist Antonio Caballero, exorcised his demons with his work, and died of AIDS. His sister Beatriz remembers him
When Beatriz Caballero’s mother died, her father, the eminent writer Eduardo Caballero Calderón, approached her following the funeral. “I have a secret to tell you” “Don’t worry dad” “No, but it’s a very terrible secret” “Don’t worry, I’ve had an abortion twice” “No, this is worse, do you remember Julián? I hugged him for the first time, when he was 12 years old, I mightn’t stop loving him. Since then we have had a relationship” Beatriz, amused, told her brother, Luis, the most brilliant painter that Bogotá has produced, the misunderstood, the neurotic who lived with his cats in an apartment in Montparnasse, the man who once told her to his wife Terry Guitar, who no longer loved her, who wanted to let go, see the world, eat all the young men they met at parties spent on cocaine, marijuana and the Rolling Stones, “Luis, dad is also a queer and he likes young men ”. Luis, so gossipy, enjoyed the gossip under his stern face.
Luis Ospina in his apartment in Paris creating from his studio
Marta Traba, the supreme priestess of Colombian art, affirmed in 1968 that Luis would be the successor of Alejandro Obregón and that at that time Luis, who was 25 years old, had not explored those imperial torsos, taken from so many peladitos that came to his apartment to fix the sound equipment, the television, the soul. At that time he still lived in a part of the house of his Terry Guitar, the beautiful gringa painter with whom he had married for love, and he had to bear the spite of seeing how one by one the boys lined up to enter their endless parties. He was a bacchanal.
But it was also misanthropy. Luis did not like people and as he became famous he had to put up with the fact that personalities from all over the art world, gallery owners, old farts wanted to visit his studio and the doors were only open for his mother, for Beatriz and for so pretty boy
Luis fell ill with AIDS at the end of the nineties. His consolation, like that other unnamed martyr of the disease, Lorenzo Jaramillo, was pizza and movies by Visconti, Buñuel, Almodovar. How Luis liked the movies! He so pictorial, so lively, he, a fire that went out in the worst way, they went out with his eyes that one day turned glaucous, they went out with his legs that no longer worked, with his pancreas that got stuck like a drain rusty. In 1995 he returned to Bogotá, to explore his old ghosts. He died with his sister and one of his assistants. He died leaving one of the most powerful, devastating, powerful pictorial works that we have and that we can enjoy whenever we want in the Bank of the Republic of Bogotá.
His sister Beatriz Caballero, with a pen as stark and precise as the strokes of her brothers, has just published Luis, Hermano Mío, a book that is an object, that is a work of art, that is a confession, that has no afraid to say things as they are and to show the demons that nurtured the works of the men she loved the most, her father Eduardo and her brother Luis.
A book to have now.
