Carlos Colombino included Ícaro, o La imagen de mi pueblo in his first exhibition at the Visual Arts Section of the OAS in 1966. The mythological figure of Icarus, who out of hubris flew too close to the sun on wings of feather and wax, plummets towards the ocean. A trail of smoke seems to issue from charred and misshapen form, a large biomorphic mass suggestive of the deformation of both body and soul. Colombino tinted the shallowly carved panel red, green, and black to imply both the injury and the fiery fate of the figure and drew inspiration formally from the surrealism of Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta, among others. Colombino’s suggestive title represents his existential despair over Paraguay’s future in an age overshadowed by the authoritarian regime of Alfredo Stroessner Mattiauda, who applied martial law, committed severe human rights abuses, and limited the freedom of the press. The artist envisioned a tragic future for Paraguay twisted by the hubris and corruption of Stroessner’s government, and Colombino, like his modernist contemporaries, used mythology to comment on the modern human condition. He became a leading figure of South American nueva figuración, and Ícaro expresses concern for the plight of Paraguayans and humanity in general in an uncertain postwar world. Born in Concepción, Paraguay, Carlos Colombino began his career as a lawyer in 1955, the same year he met artist Olga Blinder. Under the influence of Blinder, Colombino turned to art. He abandoned his legal practice in 1957 for the study of architecture at the Universidad de Asunción, eventually earning his degree in 1969. His architectural studies encouraged an interest in constructivism, which was visible in his entries in the influential 1959 exhibition South American Art Today at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1959 and the Sixth Bienal de São Paulo in 1961. Colombino’s work changed dramatically in 1962 after seeing Blinder’s woodcuts or xylographs, which led him to create an ongoing series of linocut paintings he dubbed xilopintura or xilo-paintings. Xilopintura amplified the surrealist tendencies that were beginning to appear in his work and coincided with a greater interest in social commentary. He featured his new medium in the 1963 exhibition Arte de América y España in Madrid and at the Esso Salon of Young Artists in 1965, where he won first prize for the Paraguay representation. During this time, Colombino began a career as a writer under the nom de plume Esteban Cabañas and published his first poems, Los monstruos vanos, in 1964. He developed the themes from the poems further in 1967 with an important series of xilo-paintings depicting monstrous caricatures based loosely on the tumultuous political situation in Paraguay. Apart from Colombino’s career as an artist and writer, he also helped to found the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro in 1979 in Asunción. Colombino’s role in founding the museum and his prestige as an internationally recognized artist earned him the Premio Gabriela Mistral from the Organization of American States in 1990. He died in 2013.