“Keeping, saving and remembering: Manuel D. Carvajal´s trompe l´oeil autograph drawings as elements of rhetorical visual strategy during the Colombian civil wars of the 1850s and 60s”

Manuel Doroteo Carvajal was a 19^th century Colombian painter and author of two sketchbooks currently archived at the Museo Nacional that include more than 100 drawings of portraits, genre scenes, plein air landscapes, ruins, flowers, illustrations for children´s fables, animals and fruits. The variety of his drawings also includes levels of finishing, from very detailed ink drawings to sketchier watercolors. In his approximations to the visual, Carvajal included trompe l’oeil drawings where he delicately represented cards with signatures and representations in a very realistic manner. These include autographs of family members and fellow co-workers at the Mint as well as a drawing representing his color box that was destroyed in 1862 by the conservative guerrilla. In Colombia, the history of academic art was a slow and complex process that was tainted by political factions, interrupted by civil wars, and influenced by foreigners until the 1880s. My main argument is that even though photography was established by the 1850s, Carvajal worked on these hyper realistic representations of the autograph and the scrap paper as an act of remembrance, and as a political statement by emphasizing the manual over the mechanical. By activating the process of observation and representation through material deception, Carvajal resolved both personal issues of memories and professional arguments towards art in a country constantly ravaged by civil wars where visiting cards, postcards and autographmania gained new cultural and material value as a way of keeping, saving and remembering.