Abel Rodríguez (La Chorrera, Amazonas, Colombia, 1941), ancestral name Mogaje Guihu, is regarded as one of the most vital and visionary artists of the Amazon basin. His practice occupies a singular space within contemporary Indigenous art, distinguished by a unique visual lexicon and an intimate, cosmological understanding of the rainforest.

Rodríguez’s work—extensively exhibited in major museums and cultural institutions across the globe—functions not only as a powerful aesthetic expression, but also as an essential epistemological archive. With remarkable sensitivity, he renders the rich biodiversity of the Amazon, including its flora, fauna, and the unseen spiritual entities that inhabit its ecosystems. Executed primarily in ink on paper, his compositions emerge from memory, reconstructing with extraordinary precision the landscapes of his youth and the profound ecological knowledge they contain.

His botanical expertise, acquired through an oral lineage passed down by his uncle, encompasses an ancestral taxonomy of the forest—interweaving mythological, medicinal, and ecological dimensions. In Rodríguez’s drawings, scientific observation coexists with metaphysical insight: trees, rivers, and skies are not merely depicted, but enlivened through a cosmological framework rooted in Nonuya and Huitoto traditions.

The visual language of Mogaje Guihu—meaning “the glow of the hawk’s feathers”—is characterized by its luminous layering, subtle transparencies, and complex gradations of green. His work subverts Western paradigms of landscape representation by rejecting the classical perspective in favor of a non-linear, immersive spatiality. In doing so, Rodríguez invites the viewer into an alternative ontological model in which nature is not observed from a distance but experienced as a living, sentient presence.