El encuentro / the encounter

The encounter in this painting is between a jaguar and a crocodilian. Javier Morales Casas paints the Tolima countryside and its tales of “encuentros con el diablo, seres maravillosos y brujas” (encounters with the devil, marvelous beings and witches).

In a Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) catalog, the anthropologist Roberto Pineda Camacho writes that the Tolima shaman became “a la vez ave y jaguar” (at once bird and jaguar), and that the jaguars and caimans carved on shamans’ seats symbolize “los procesos de mutación del mismo hombre en estos seres” (the man’s transformation into these beings).

The Museo del Oro calls a Zenú gold piece of a jaguar holding a caiman “una escena de caza” (a hunting scene). In Plato, a town on the Magdalena River, the legend of the Hombre Caimán (Caiman Man) tells of a fisherman whom a sorcerer’s potions left “atrapado en su cuerpo de caimán y rostro de humano” (trapped in a caiman’s body with a human face) in the writer Juan Luis Romani Arroyo’s retelling.