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Lot Essay
“I have always worked with memory, but my memory comes from the media,” González recently explained of her practice. “It amazes me how fast people forget the images from the news. The way that I fight against or try to prevent the memories from disappearing as fast is to use those images in my drawings and in my work. This process culminates in a work with a popular character, a monument but an ephemeral one.”1 Since the mid-1960s, González has assembled an archive of newspaper cuttings, graphics, and fine art reproductions—now numbering more than 8,000 pieces—that encompass crime scenes and society pages, Old Master engravings and global icons from Pope John Paul II to British royalty. These clippings have served as source images for paintings that broach kitsch and social satire, at times drawing comparisons to the Pop art of Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter in their mediated critique of social pretention, good taste, and mass consumerism. A protégé of the noted art critic Marta Traba, González occupies a place between Fernando Botero and Doris Salcedo, her work evolving from parodies of pop-cultural identity to sobering attestations to Colombia’s chronic political violence, a turn prompted by the Palace of Justice siege in Bogotá (1985) and a new imperative to preserve her country’s collective and historical memory.
González began to work with news cutouts in 1965 in a series of drawings of Lyndon B. Johnson and in Los suicidas del Sisga, iconic paintings based on a grainy, black-and-white photograph of two religious fanatics who drowned themselves in a suicide pact meant to preserve the purity of their love. The couple was memorialized by a portrait photograph, widely circulated in the papers, that they had commissioned before their fateful jump from the Sisga dam. “The quality, or ‘the bad quality’ of the image, awoke my interest,” González recalls. “I was attracted by the plain quality of the printed image, the simplification of the facial features, almost deformed by the discrepancy.”2 She first adapted the flattened, schematized style of the newspaper images to paintings on canvas, but by 1970 she began to work with furniture, beginning with a metal bed—a kind of readymade, or objet trouvé—and eventually encompassing cribs, cabinets, and tables that she customized and had made at a factory. The furniture pieces served as frames for brightly colored enamel paintings that riff on mass-media images of motley subjects, among them a Degas bather and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Sun-Maid girl and Simón Bolívar.
“I represent something that, though already there in a photograph or a reproduction, is, after all, a meta-representation—a representation of a representation,” González has remarked of her recycled furniture pieces. “I surround these paintings with large frames that contain suggestions about the paintings themselves. They are big frames, like colonial altarpieces."3 Here, an unremarkable metal nightstand provides a garish, three-dimensional frame to a painting of the legendary Argentine tango singer and matinee idol Carlos Gardel, who died when his plane crashed in Medellín in 1935. Based on a stock photo, the painting portrays Gardel in three-quarter view: his dazzling smile, revealing a row of perfect, mint-green teeth, and sharply slicked-back hair belie the melancholy of his ballads, suffused with sultry yearning, sadness, and sentimentalism. González reflects upon Gardel’s enduring celebrity, encapsulated in the popular saying “cada día canta mejor,” in this work, pondering the culture and commercialization of fame as well as “the power of simulation,” implicated as well by the frame.
“I was very interested in factory painters’ ability to mimic wood and marble [on metal],” González recalls, particularly “the ‘falsification of materials:’ wood wasn’t wood; marble wasn’t marble.”4 The faux wood panels that surround Gardel bear a strong resemblance to those in Kennedy (John Fitzgerald), político demócrata norteamericano (1917-1963) presidente de los Estados Unidos en 1961. Murió asesinado (1971); the nightstand appears with slight variations in Saluti da San Pietro. Trisagio (1971), based on a postcard of the Vatican, and in Retrato de un conocido (1973). Across these works and their seemingly incongruous subjects, the artifice of the medium—metal masquerading as wood—and the use of enamel paint, with its industrial connotations, exposes the simulacrum of representation and memory. Instantly immortal, Gardel lives on in González’s ersatz nightstand, his smile and stardom framed as a parodic monument to popular idolatry.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
González began to work with news cutouts in 1965 in a series of drawings of Lyndon B. Johnson and in Los suicidas del Sisga, iconic paintings based on a grainy, black-and-white photograph of two religious fanatics who drowned themselves in a suicide pact meant to preserve the purity of their love. The couple was memorialized by a portrait photograph, widely circulated in the papers, that they had commissioned before their fateful jump from the Sisga dam. “The quality, or ‘the bad quality’ of the image, awoke my interest,” González recalls. “I was attracted by the plain quality of the printed image, the simplification of the facial features, almost deformed by the discrepancy.”2 She first adapted the flattened, schematized style of the newspaper images to paintings on canvas, but by 1970 she began to work with furniture, beginning with a metal bed—a kind of readymade, or objet trouvé—and eventually encompassing cribs, cabinets, and tables that she customized and had made at a factory. The furniture pieces served as frames for brightly colored enamel paintings that riff on mass-media images of motley subjects, among them a Degas bather and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Sun-Maid girl and Simón Bolívar.
“I represent something that, though already there in a photograph or a reproduction, is, after all, a meta-representation—a representation of a representation,” González has remarked of her recycled furniture pieces. “I surround these paintings with large frames that contain suggestions about the paintings themselves. They are big frames, like colonial altarpieces."3 Here, an unremarkable metal nightstand provides a garish, three-dimensional frame to a painting of the legendary Argentine tango singer and matinee idol Carlos Gardel, who died when his plane crashed in Medellín in 1935. Based on a stock photo, the painting portrays Gardel in three-quarter view: his dazzling smile, revealing a row of perfect, mint-green teeth, and sharply slicked-back hair belie the melancholy of his ballads, suffused with sultry yearning, sadness, and sentimentalism. González reflects upon Gardel’s enduring celebrity, encapsulated in the popular saying “cada día canta mejor,” in this work, pondering the culture and commercialization of fame as well as “the power of simulation,” implicated as well by the frame.
“I was very interested in factory painters’ ability to mimic wood and marble [on metal],” González recalls, particularly “the ‘falsification of materials:’ wood wasn’t wood; marble wasn’t marble.”4 The faux wood panels that surround Gardel bear a strong resemblance to those in Kennedy (John Fitzgerald), político demócrata norteamericano (1917-1963) presidente de los Estados Unidos en 1961. Murió asesinado (1971); the nightstand appears with slight variations in Saluti da San Pietro. Trisagio (1971), based on a postcard of the Vatican, and in Retrato de un conocido (1973). Across these works and their seemingly incongruous subjects, the artifice of the medium—metal masquerading as wood—and the use of enamel paint, with its industrial connotations, exposes the simulacrum of representation and memory. Instantly immortal, Gardel lives on in González’s ersatz nightstand, his smile and stardom framed as a parodic monument to popular idolatry.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park