Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 12
A micro essay practice
The didactic panel in the museum tells us “Violencia” by Alejandro Obregon is a key piece in the history of Colombian art. It sits on its own on a far wall at the end of a long gallery whose other walls contain abstract paintings in colors and forms that suggest the pain of Colombia’s decade-long civil war from 1948–1958, a period also called, simply, “La Violencia.”
Though I’m on my fifth visit to Colombia, I don’t yet have a deep understanding of the political and social currents that led to the mid-20th century war, how the country emerged out of it, or how the conflict ripples forward to now. The images and the art that came out of it rhyme with other conflicts and periods and regions I know, though. The expressions on the faces of people ripped from their lives by violence look similar, whether depicted in joy or hope before, in pain and duress during, or in loss and devastation after a conflict, from Armenia to Auschwitz, Delhi to Lahore, Hiroshima to Vietnam, Chile to Argentina, Iraq to Gaza, Darfur to Myanmar, and on and on and on. The artistic interpretations and abstractions of these events hit the same in the soul and the gut, and are each part of a set of stories that should never have to have been told. But these things did happen. And keep happening.
“Violencia” calls to this. I sat and stared at the painting, mesmerized for what seemed like hours, even if it was in truth only a few minutes. The painting, whose colors of black and grey and red are hypnotic in their suggestion of blood and flesh and soil, seams the body of a pregnant woman, her gashed face turned toward the viewer, into the rural terrain where most of the war’s violence was waged. I don’t if she is alive in the painting. But the depiction of her body suggests a state of perpetual unrest.
This unrest is a plea for this never to happen again. “Violencia” calls to a form of regret, to remind us of complicity, of participation, and of memory and forgetting. It is one in a body of artworks that should never have to have existed. But they do. And there should be more, because we persist in harm. Images created from atrocities share a sense of familiarity and poignancy, connected to each other regardless of their individual political contexts. They are tied into a string of shared human experience through witnessing and documenting. They are beautiful and ugly and necessary, until someday perhaps they will no longer be. They are resistance.
