With the intaglios, Omar Rayo opened up new possibilities for paper, a material he venerated and defined as “a two-sided god to carry the ideas of men.” Rayo’s intaglios were relief prints on Arches paper. According to the website of the Museo Rayo, the origin of this technique can be traced back to chance: “As a graphic workshop student [the artist] forgets about metal sheets and finds a way to submit his exercises on time. He uses real objects as the basis of his work. That is when tied shoelaces, pins, and scissors start to appear, as he designs cardboard screens of abstract geometric shapes.” These techniques do not involve the use of ink or colors; everything is built from the volume and the shadow it creates. Even though the title of the piece alludes to a real object, Vertical Glass evidently belongs to the group of geometric-abstract works, and the date of the piece indicates that it is a documentation of his first years experimenting with this technique. Rayo never exhibited his intaglios publicly until he moved to Mexico, when he showed them in New York in 1961. The following year, the Museum of Modern Art purchased a dozen of these pieces, confirming a success that would only grow in the following years. In the sixties, while the artist was living in the United States, his intaglios were informed by pop art: the objects, which were previously directly traced on paper, were replaced by elements of mass consumption—shirts, pants, hangers, among others—carved with essential and stylized lines sometimes including areas of uniform color. Born in the Cauca Valley, Omar Rayo studied art by mail at the Academia Zier in Buenos Aires. In the mid-forties, he moved to Bogotá, where he worked as an illustrator for various publications and frequented the bohemia of the Café Automático, an important cultural center at the time. His work in the late forties and early fifties oscillates between the geometry of his wooden caricatures—where shapes are built by juxtaposing mimetically-represented planks of wood—and organic shapes, tree-like humans placed in empty spaces, influenced by the surrealism of Dalí and Tanguy. These last series of drawings and watercolors were grouped under the label bejuquismo. After an extensive journey across Latin America (1954-1958) in which he studied, worked, and exhibited in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, his work changed. His trip resulted in the Vía Sur series, which revealed a tendency toward geometry and abstraction, through the dialog with pre-Hispanic aesthetics and local modern masters, from Andean indigenism to the constructivism of Torres García, also including Tamayo. After receiving a fellowship from the Organization of American States, in 1959 Rayo moved to Mexico City to study graphic art, where he mastered the intaglio technique, which opened up another important vein of his work: that of printmaking. In 1961 he moved to New York, where he remained until 1998. At the beginning of the sixties, his paintings showed a geometric formalism akin to that being developed by Manuel Felguérez in Mexico, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar in Colombia, and American hard-edge artists. However, around 1963-1964, his work became more personal, possibly driven by his use of paper while working with the intaglio technique. Now, his mimetic representations of cutouts and paper strips were folded and interwoven, creating shadows and geometric shapes with varying degrees of complexity. This personal style earned him international recognition. From the sixties until his death, Rayo held numerous solo and collective exhibitions both in the United States and Latin America.