Beatriz Gonzalez: Death self replicates, and so does peace.

Posted on 16 October, 2024 by coordinv

Emilia Amezcua

 

All human beings search for intelligibility of the violence that surrounds them. Wanting to find a reason for violence is a primary reaction when faced with the events that go through us so senselessly. A violent panorama necessarily creates an explanation from the mouth of those who live it. We could not accept with arms crossed that this is all there is, that all the cruelty was in vain. We need, at least, a mythical reason which allows us to sleep more peacefully at night. We need to be certain of something, just as we are certain that spring will come again and new flowers will bloom.

 

 

 

 

When it seems that violence stops having a reason that accompanies it, Beatriz Gonzalez doesn’t accept the vileness of the act, and she reappropriates the figure and the body as a sensitive communicative tool. The artist recovers the maximum consequence of violence, which is death, but she never trivializes it. González found a way to take violence and turn it against itself.

 

How to depict what many people do not dare to see? That which the cameras seem to forget with miraculous convenience. How to depict where everybody looks away? How to bring tragedy closer to people without speaking the dialect of cruelty, without trivializing horror? What is the face of mourning? How do the feet of the late rest? How do you paint a dead person without demoting or vexing them? What is offered to whom are only left with mourning and a death that repeats? These are some of the questions that Beatriz Gonzales discusses through her work.

 

Gonzalez exhibited Guerra y Paz: una poética del gesto in the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City. The Colombian Artist’s works show how to use the figure and the gestures as vehicles to establish emotional bridges of communication with the viewer. Gonzalez appropriates popular images and photojournalism, not to reproduce the show nor the art-merchandise, but to generate a “painting of province”, what others have called a “pop art of the South”. The works of González are a recollection of the violence in public life of Colombia, but with an unusual methodology for her field: few times has pop art been used as a communicative tool to approach the empathy and the desolation that come after violence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the first room of her exhibition, there are different portraits of politicians and celebrities, they remind us of the style of mass-reproduction of the icons by Andy Warhol. On the other hand, there is the second room, where the exposition starts to take empathy as its guide. Here, we look face to face at grief, recreated in all its possibilities. In the end, a portrayal is only a decision about what we pay attention to, portraying is a politic task. Mourning, although not something to take slightly, can and must be recreated as anything else. Beatriz paints death, but more importantly, paints what is left behind it. She walks the path of solace with admirable respect.

 

 

The artist depicts many ways to bury a body, but what is most important in her work is not the burial of the body but the emptiness of energy that is left behind the rite. In her work, the mysticism of the moment where the relatives rescue the last whiff of energy to pay the last ritual to a beloved one is observed. The pictures could perfectly be of a historical moment, but they could also be any day in Latin America. The dailiness of the paintings grows unbearable in our memory as the exposition reaches its end. The characters who live inside Gonzalez’ work cry, laugh, scream, eat, hug or rest at the end of life, in a park, in a river, in a grave, in a vacant lot.

The last room of the exposition is memorable. “Auras anónimas” is a commemorative and immersive space. The room repeats in its four walls the silhouettes of men carrying a body. “Los cargueros” (The bearers) and “los excavadores” (the excavators) are communicative tools of which Gonzales has appropriated in her work, with them the artist has generated icons of the violent situation in her country. After the signing of the Peace Agreement in Colombia, the author confirms that her country is hovering between war and peace. To continue painting with violence in our hands is a way to compensate for those who are still touched by life and violence. The sustained repetition of the bearers is presented in this space as a prayer for these same pictures to stop repeating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gonzalez’s work opens the dialog regarding the titanic task of living in grief. Grief consumes everything. Grief is an experience of repetition, and therefore death reproduces in the body of those who mourn. Death has echoes that settle in the gesture, in the scream, in the bended body. Death multiplies beyond the victim’s body and its scent clings to those who mourn. We could expect Gonalez’s work not to repeat itself, that is to say, that art could get back to other discussions, that we didn’t have to be talking about violence. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this encounter with grief  what is needed to regain our sense of community. If violence is sustained, consistent and systematic, then it is our responsibility to open spaces where we could talk about grief. Maybe by opening a public discussion on grief, we could begin to see that peace, in its essential fragility, reproduces itself too.