Gaitán comes from an affluent family, but his father died when he was little. He studied social communications, is especially interested in radio, and spent some time teaching. In 1975, he overheard the bizarre sentence, “Don’t eat so many sweets, or you’ll catch amoebas,” which apparently marked a turning point in his life and started him on his artistic career. Gaitán spends entire days in libraries, meticulously selecting texts, copying them, and subsequently altering them: first he crosses out most of the letters, then he adds collages and symbols in an unchanging and carefully chosen range of colors. Like echoes of that fateful sentence, on each of his pages we encounter amoebae (which he calls “pseudopods”), through which the cells achieve amoeboid movement.