ABEL RODRÍGUEZ + AYCOOBO

From the treetops

Abel Rodríguez and Aycoobo

The work of Abel Rodríguez (La Chorrera, 1944 – Bogotá, 2025) and his son Aycoobo (Wilson Rodríguez, La Chorrera, 1967) belongs to a creative constellation of Indigenous Amazonian artists who, over the past two or three decades, have transformed how we understand and discuss what we call "contemporary art." Their experiences and visual vocabularies originate outside the established circuits of Western art, and thus challenge the ways modernist and avant-garde historiographies have dismissed the creative languages of Indigenous peoples and communities. The fact that Abel and Aycoobo’s works now hold significant local and international prominence reflects a restructuring of the value systems and categories that, throughout the 20th century, shaped the art world under Eurocentric parameters and hierarchies of class, race, and gender.

Neither Abel nor Aycoobo had formal artistic or academic training. Both developed their aesthetic skills empirically, through observation and their relationship with nature, within their families and communities. Like the work of other major Indigenous Amazonian artists—such as Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Yanomami) or Santiago Yahuarcani (Huitoto)—their drawings insist on revealing the bonds between bodies, animals, plants, territory, and spiritual worlds. These images demand respect for an ecological relationship and forms of knowledge that, in the Western world, have faded under models of life based on consumption and extraction.

Of Nonuya origin and raised in a Muinane community, Abel learned from his uncle to cultivate an affective and spiritual connection with rainforest plants. In the 1980s, while working as a guide for researchers from the NGO Tropenbos Colombia Foundation, he began documenting plant species and their uses, introducing new perspectives on how to represent the knowledge safeguarded by the forest. In the 1990s, after relocating to Bogotá, he started creating botanical drawings at the invitation of his friend, biologist Carlos Rodríguez. His images depicted a vast variety of plants and their medicinal, nutritional, and ritual uses, while also capturing transformations in the land—the fruit trees surrounding malocas (communal houses), or stories of the world’s origins in his renderings of the Tree of Life. A decade later, these drawings began circulating in contemporary art exhibitions, many focused on political ecology, natural history, and the planetary climate crisis. Yet Abel never altered his way of representing the forest—his participation in the art world was incidental, for what his images had to say came from the heart of the earth. It is not by chance that his drawings are filled with towering treetops, reminding us of the modest scale of the human life and body.

His son, Aycoobo, followed in his footsteps, taking the portrayal of nature to new directions. His drawings seem to make visible the energy shared by animals, plants, and spiritual beings of the rainforest. Like enchanted landscapes, Aycoobo invites us to see what can only be perceived beyond the parameters of settler coloniality. The artist crafts sensual representations where tree trunks, roots, animal skins, and landscape elements form part of a living fabric, their vibrant patterns and colors reminding us that other dimensions of reality exist.

It is no surprise that their work now holds a central place in debates about ecosystem conservation and the urgency of halting the Amazon’s destruction. Yet this is also a double-edged sword. As Candice Hopkins, an Indigenous curator of Carcross/Tagish ancestry, has noted, the growing interest in Indigenous art emerges at times when Western culture and ideologies are in a state of crisis—a moment that has spurred recognition of how Indigenous knowledge might "save the planet." However, this expectation is problematic, as it shifts the burden of planetary defense onto Indigenous communities, erasing the fact that it is the West’s extractive logic that imposed a life model based on resource depletion.

Abel and Aycoobo’s works reveal constellations of visible and invisible worlds that endure despite deforestation, the murder of Amazonian leaders, and land privatization. Though often described as warnings of today’s environmental collapse, they look far beyond the present, urging us to confront a deeper past. As scholar Elizabeth Povinelli argues, ecological collapse is not confined to recent decades (or the so-called Anthropocene) but is an ancestral catastrophe—a process that began with the destruction and dispossession first experienced by Indigenous and colonized peoples.

In their timelessness—their insistence on returning to the same scenes and landscapes again and again—Abel and Aycoobo’s drawings propose alternate ways of thinking about time. They honor balance, reciprocity, and the natural world’s interdependence, affirming the presence of multiple forms of existence and consciousness. Their images are affective inventories of the future, where pluralistic visions of life prevail.

Miguel A. López

Acknowledgment: Instituto de Visión