Review by Beatriz Gonzalez – The bodies pile up in a thrilling retrospective that may be too much to bear | Art and design

TBeatriz Gonzalez’s art is saturated with light, strong color, and blood. Her sprawling, uneven retrospective reflects the turbulent politics and violence of her native Colombia, and the breadth of a body of work that addresses art history and popular, regional, and global culture. At times it is as scathing as a cartoonist, depicting the generals as a row of faceless parrots with blank faces. “I didn’t want to be a lady who painted,” she once said. Gonzalez was born in the provincial city of Bucaramanga in 1932, and died last January in Bogotá, shortly before the current exhibition moved to the Barbican from São Paulo’s Pinacoteca. She was 93 years old.

Gonzalez’s presentation is convincing. It is also sometimes difficult to bear. She did not begin her work as a painter until her 30s, beginning with loose versions and variations on Diego Velázquez’s 1634-35 The Surrender of Breda (all Spaniards and Dutchmen in big hats, with the city burning behind them) and Vermeer’s 1669-70 The Lace Maker. Given her interest in her mission, Vermeer’s subject matter perhaps serves as a stand-in for the young Colombian painter herself. She soon began flattening the shapes and raising the temperature, making the paintings her own. It oscillated, but never became abstract. Her exposure to European art was limited (although she traveled to Europe and New York) and most of her knowledge came from copies, often of poor quality.

From the beginning, Gonzalez was an avid consumer and collector of images. She built a vast archive of postcards, news stories, advertisements, and newspaper photographs, often concerned with lurid and salacious events, street incidents, and crime scenes, all of which reflected the fabric of her country and its turmoil. She never threw anything away, and it all fed into her art. Annotated collections of these images, displayed in showcases, intersperse the current show. Masked wrestlers and bodybuilders, beauty queens, suicides by hanging, copies of ancient artists, Catholic priests in authentic feather headdresses, Jackie Onassis on the back of a camel, the young Queen Elizabeth II presiding over the loss of the empire, saints in devotions, religious kitsch, gallery flyers: the longer I looked, the more frightened I felt. What comes next?

The González archive, like Gerhard Richter’s atlas, is more than just a repository of source images. It is a work in itself, a way of thinking for its time. What’s missing is also important: decades of disappearances, torture, kidnappings, internecine warfare, drug-related terrorism, battles between political factions, left- and right-wing guerrilla groups and paramilitaries, and attacks on indigenous rights.

In 1965, González highlighted the story of a young couple – Antonio Martínez Ponza, a gardener, and Tulia Vargas, a domestic worker – who threw themselves into a reservoir at the Cisga Dam, near Bogotá. It was an attempt, Ponza wrote in a suicide note, to save his girlfriend’s purity from a sinful world. A previously posed official photo of the couple has appeared in several Colombian newspapers, in which they stare out with a kind of sombre anonymity. González painted several copies, flat, simplified, brightly colored, their hands blended together, their faces masks of normality and a kind of emptiness. We should never equate Gonzalez’s bright color with optimism.

She began making prints, based on reports of horrific crimes in newspapers, such as the murder of a homeless matador in the middle of a furniture store, and another incident in which a man committed hara-kiri in the street. He stares at his blood-stained waistcoat, as if bewildered. There were unaccountable deaths, bodies without names, and people killed for no apparent reason. “What caught my attention was the presence of death, laying heads, or chaos in the bedroom where a murder had occurred,” Gonzalez noted.

Sometimes she would return to the photos years later, even decades later. In 1985, González revisited two prints from 1969, based on photographs of an unidentified sex worker found dead on a mattress, and another of the body of an elderly man, Catalino Díaz Izquierdo. She recreated images of corpses and blood spots on cheap bedsheets; The old man is horribly contorted in a repeating pattern of a deer stopping by the river, while the unknown woman is drawn on a flower-filled bedspread, much like the patterned mattress on which her murdered body was found. At first glance, you might think that these were images of calm, and that their subjects were asleep. Then there’s the crooked mouth, the unnatural posture, and all that blood.

For a long time, González moved away from oil painting, working instead with enamel, painting not on canvas but on cheap metal furniture. She painted sticky portraits of cardinals on bedside tables, decorated a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” on a hideous low table, and painted a tortured Christ on the foot of a metal bed. I enjoyed kitsch.

She also drew sick pictures on television, including one of Colombian President Julio César Torbay. Torbay was previously part of the military junta during the La Violencia period. In 1981, the president and his entourage were photographed singing Mexican folk songs at a party celebrating the military officer who had issued a new security law that caused writer Gabriel García Márquez and others to flee into exile. Lovely and bow-tied, Torbay looks like an impresario or game show host among his hysterically cheering assistants. Gonzalez turned the photo into a pleated curtain, called interior decor, which can be purchased at the yard.

In 1985, the M-19 guerrilla group surrounded the Palace of Justice in Bogota and took everyone inside hostage. Newly appointed President Belisario Bettencourt ordered the army to storm the building, sparking a fire that killed about 100 people, including civilians and members of the judiciary. Gonzalez replied, saying: Mr. President, what an honor it is to be with you at this historic moment. It is a large drawing in which the smiling president and his ministers appear at work, and a charred body rests on the table in front of them.

The violence continues, and it’s getting worse. Bodies pile up. Gonzalez’s paintings became more direct and harsher during the 1980s and 1990s. As events escalated, her responses took on a more elegiac tone. Women cover their faces with their hands. The rower looks over one shoulder and gives the viewer a suspicious look. The corpses often have a greater presence than the living, even hidden in their coffins.

In 2003, the mayor of Bogota announced that he intended to demolish a number of shrines in the central cemetery, which contains the remains of hundreds of victims of the conflict in Colombia. Gonzalez and her friend and fellow artist Doris Salcedo pledged to save the structures, which Salcedo wrote were “parts of Bogotá’s history that convey aspects of the past that are essential to understanding the present.” The artists’ project faltered and the remains were eventually removed, leaving the niches open and empty, and Gonzalez had the idea of ​​closing them with small tombstones, each of the 8,956 graves decorated with screen-printed silhouettes of two men carrying a corpse. She produced eight variations of the image, with bodies raised in a sack or dangled between poles and carried like a trophy.

The final room in the Barbican is lined with digital prints of headstones and images of men carrying bodies. The anonymous shrines and shrines of Gonzalez were designated in 2007-2009 as National Heritage and permanently secured as a Site of Remembrance. Unknown Auras may be González’s best work, in terms of its brevity and impact. Everything led to this, inevitably. What a strong and creative artist she was, and what times she lived.