The analysis of José Gamarra’s work would take much more than a preface. His painting, because of its trajectory, the forms through which he passed and the historical and political issues he makes visible, is one of the most intriguing of its time, our time.
Gamarra, born in Uruguay in 1934, first developed a painting-writing of semi-abstract pictograms until the mid-1960s. These graphics then became increasingly dense and colorful and evolved into explicit representations, which in the early 1970s found their way into symbolic landscapes. These became more and more realistic from the following decade until his most recent paintings.
This makes four periods, as they say in art history books, at the risk of overlooking the obvious: it is one and the same artist we are talking about and, underneath the stylistic differences, a coherence is maintained. What is the coherence underlying Gamarra’s painting? This is what we should seek to uncover. To do this, a methodical approach has been decided upon: to rely almost exclusively on the works themselves, to consider them outside of what has been written about them, to place oneself in the position of an explorer of an unknown land. The external elements of interpretation employed are either data from the ancient and contemporary history of Latin America, or references taken from the universal history of the arts.
Signs and pictograms
Much has been written about the early years, from 1959 to 1964. This period, which is that of the artist’s recognition on the Latin American and then European art scene, has been amply commented on by critics and has subsequently been the subject of retrospective looks. Therefore, it is not the one on which this essay will focus on. The need to analyze Gamarra’s later work, from the 1970s to the present day, is imposed due to the smaller number of works about it and because of the considerable stakes that are manifested through the means of painting.
This period is therefore Gamarra’s entry into the field of contemporary art as he knew it where he lived, in Uruguay and Brazil, at the end of the 1950s. Until then, he proved his aptitude for drawing and painting at an early age, trying his hand at protraits, landscape and still life. He received the teachings that were being taught in the schools of fine arts, which were more or less out of step with the practices of the avant-garde. The years of his training in Montevideo were, in New York as in Paris, those of the reign of action painting, the informal and other forms of abstraction, expressionist or “constructed”, gestural or geometric. The diffusion of these trends goes hand in hand with a more precise knowledge of the founding artists whose importance is revealed after their death: Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian mainly. Thus the past and present of abstraction are now exposed simultaneously, the former legitimizing the latter, the latter drawing attention to the former. A history of modernity begins to be written. In Latin America, the founding of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 met this double requirement: to show what had not been seen, or was rarely seen, before the Second World War and to show what was being created in the two Americas and in Europe. Gamarra has been a familiar face at the Biennial since its inception and has worked and exhibited in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities. Although the word had not yet been coined, he is an exemplary artist of the globalization of contemporary art. It is not surprising, if we remember the density of the cultural relations between Latin America and Europe since the interwar period, and more particularly between Brazil and Uruguay on the one hand and France on the other. Gamarra is part of this history and continues it.
Seen from this angle, from 1959 onwards, his works affirm that their author is a young modern, 25 years old that year, familiar with the major works of modernity, ready to seize their language and driven by the need to introduce his own singularity. He had to find his own way from those opened by his predecessors, of whom he could not be an imitator. The period known as “signs” between 1959 and 1964 is a time of assimilation and emancipation, the two processes responding to each other.
The paintings are presented as two-dimensional compositions, most often on a monochrome background, whether this monochromy is that of a color spread over the entire surface or that of the canvas or paper bare. These compositions are little colored with a dominant of gray, browns, ochres and the colors of the lines and the signs can be identical to that of the bottom. These are distinguished by their density and a very slight relief. These elements are arranged in friezes, according to grids or all over. In the last case, no identifiable diagram seems to order the distribution of the signs. Those belong to several kinds, according to their degree of complexity. At the simplest, they are points, lines, arrows, circles, quadrilaterals more or less regular. At the most complex, they are combinations of these primary elements, with interlocking, framing, rosettes, alternating bands, grids with irregular or orthogonal meshes. Gamarra draws them with a brush, incises them in the pictorial material or deposits linear filaments and punctuations of paint, thus obtaining the effect of relief thanks to which these graphics are visible despite the chromatic uniformity. Nevertheless, the eye must be pierced in front of the 1962 and 1963 canvases that push the chromatic homogeneity to the limit, M 63503 or M 63720 according to the registration system that Gamarra applied at the time and that freed him from the obligation of the title. In this extreme state, the question of lighting takes on a decisive importance: a matter of light intensity, angle and distance of view. M 631001 or M 63210 defy photographic reproduction as much as the capacities of the human eye. While dark tones dominate, Gamarra also experiments with white, in which the signs are no more than traces on the surface of a snowy or cottony expanse and which absorbs them: thus M 63506.
It is not difficult to inscribe this painting in the chronicle of the avant-gardes. Two-dimensionality, angular geometry and the reduction of chromatism characterize the cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1911 onwards, and in Gamarra’s still lifes of 1960-61, those executed by Picasso in the 1940s seem to have left their mark. The composition by parallel and superimposed registers of signs appears in Paul Klee’s work at the Bauhaus and in that of Joaquim Torres-Garcia, Gamarra’s compatriot and a central figure of modernity in Uruguay when he returned in 1934, made the Circle and Square group known there and founded the Taller Torres Garcia in 1943. Gamarra’s biographers emphasize that through his teachers at the Fine Arts School in Montevideo, he was touched by Torres-Garcia’s conceptions. Another element of his language calls for comparisons: the density of the pictorial layers, the incisions and the micro-reliefs. There is the idea that a painting must solicit another sense than the sight and assert its material presence. This idea was apparent in Cubism when Braque and Picasso added sand or plaster powder and was later found in artists as different as André Masson, Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapiés. Around 1960, Gamarra showed the same desire to give his paintings more density. Thus, he is part of a certain conception of painting, which is already clearly identified and defined when he makes it his own.
Contradicting abstraction
To make it his own does not mean to adopt it uniformly. From his first attempts, Gamarra allowed himself singularities. His Naturalaeza Muerta en Grises (1961) and most of his contemporary compositions cannot be considered geometric abstractions, whether their title indicates this or not. Many of the forms suggest figurative interpretations: masks, fish, boats, sea urchins, open fruits, plants, cups, propellers, etc. No doubt they are not immediately identifiable, having been deprived of their usual volumes and colors. But a little attention is enough to make them visible. Thus the question of abstraction arises: if there are Gamarra exclusively or mainly made of abstract signs, sometimes added with capital letters and numbers – in 1963 M 63101 and M 63721 – they are more the exception than the rule. Most often these tracings, including the most stripped, are pictograms, i.e. simplified drawings whose structure refers to figures or objects. They are not writings, however tempting this word may be, if we mean letters or signs that can only be understood in an alphabetic or calligraphic system, a stable and transmissible code. Gamarra does not write: he draws. A circle with external rays can be deciphered as sun or sea urchin, and if the rays are internal to the circumference, it could be orange. This deciphering is made possible by the visual resemblance of the diagram. These pictograms belong to a stage of communication based on a visual perception, stage that the anthropology of the 19th century and the first decades of the 19th century considered as “primitive” by comparison with the developed stage, that of the writing and the reading of abstract signs of which nothing in the form indicates that they refer to such object. The Gamarra of the early 1960s cannot be considered as the univocal manifestations of his rallying to the cause of abstraction, so powerful after 1945 that it seems to be understood that abstraction and modernity are synonymous. One might even be tempted to think that his paintings should be viewed in the opposite direction from this interpretation: not as declarations of allegiance, but as attempts to escape the fashion that was then triumphant at the São Paulo Biennale as well as in Venice, New York and Paris.
Thus, we arrive at the notion of emancipation. While, around 1960, the official heroes of modernity were Rothko, Newman, Kline, Hartung or Soulages, Gamarra, who was of a younger generation, introduced disruptions in the frontality, the monochrome and the sign. These disturbances are of two orders: the primitive and the contemporary. Allusions to systems of signs specific to civilizations outside the history of Western art, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Renaissance and the modern age, are part of what is still most often described as primitive cultures, however inappropriate this term may be. The origins of these allusions are not easy to identify. No more than it would be possible to affirm that a sign in a composition by Klee or Torres-Garcia comes from a specific culture, be it Amerindian, African, Neolithic, Paleolithic, Sumerian or from any other time and place, such an identification is not possible for Gamarra’s signs. And even less for him than for the artists of the previous generations: if the knowledge of the prehistoric and non-western civilizations is still, in the interwar period, limited to the visitors of museums as the Museum of the Man and to the readers of the books and the magazines of anthropology and ethnography where Torres-Garcia takes the images that he collates in his album Structures in 1932, it is not any more of it towards 1960. Through photography, it is then easy to learn about the rock drawings of Australia and southern Africa, the Celtic and Scandinavian runes, the cosmogonies of the Aztecs as well as those of the Dogons, the mythologies of the Mayas or the Inuits. These so-called primitive arts now belong to the general history of civilizations. Expect to determine the origin of Gamarra’s signs would therefore be risky. It is more important to observe that these pictograms are likely to be understood and related to myths and constituted codes. The abstract expressionist gestures refer to the body and the subjectivity of an individual. In contrast, Gamarra’s signs “signify” the natural elements, the human body in its generality, the bird or the fish – and it is impossible to be mistaken and not see the fin and the beak, the eye and the horn. These are coded symbols.
It is equally impossible not to see the planes and helicopters, the propellers and wheels whose pictograms dot the compositions that without them would be the most archaic. Reduced to few lines and points, but nevertheless identifiable, they introduce incongruous anachronisms. The engraving of an airplane diagram in a style that evokes the art of Australian aborigines, how to understand it? Either, superficially, as a formal game; or, more profoundly, as the index of a history, that of the penetration of the aboriginal territories first, of their tourist frequentation then, which both are accomplished by air. Thus looked at, this pictogram of an airplane in archaic style says that modernity and its techniques now reign everywhere. This process is more and more frequent from 1962. Seen too quickly, M 63721 is an almost prehistoric palimpsest where a sun stands out among enigmatic black runes on a black background, quite similar to those of M 63105. But, in the lower part, according to the same process, Gamarra draws a flying machine, whose two-wheeled landing gear allows to recompose the structure. The same is true of M 63101, with its two helicopters, the stylized aeroplanes of M 63001, or the tricycle graphics of M 63522, which are adjacent to signs of eyes, sun and, perhaps, fish. A game is organized between the archaic and the contemporary, meetings between worlds very distant in time and space: this is in accordance with the state of the world and of the memory of the contemporary men, in which the fragments of very old past are mixed with knowledge and current habits.
The revolution of color
This first state of his painting was the one that brought Gamarra awards and invitations, including the one that brought him to Paris in 1963 for the III Biennale des Jeunes. This was a decisive trip: the artist decided to settle in France and, in the Parisian context, was confronted with works and movements that were less accessible to him before. The following year, he was part of the Uruguayan selection for the 32nd Venice Biennale. This Biennale will go down in history as the one that acknowledged the major role of the New York scene by awarding a prize to Robert Rauschenberg: a pivotal moment with consequences that are still felt today. In 1965, he was invited to the Mona Lisa Festival held in April in Del Pezzo’s studio, and then, due to its success, in October in Mathias Fels’ gallery. There he rubbed shoulders with Klasen, Lebel, Sarkis, Filliou and Baj, who had come together to pay homage to Marcel Duchamp, who visited the exhibition, and to LHOOQ. In 1966, he travels for the first time to the United States and stays two months in New York and is part of the founders of the group AUTOMAT in 1966, with whom he participates in the V° Biennale des Jeunes de Paris the following year. “It is necessary to welcome these innocent monsters, these mocking games, these delirious inventions. They are the gadgets of the saved poetry” wrote the critic Jean-Jacques Lévêque. L’homme qui crie and the Computer Woman, which makes strangely think of the feminine Etant donnés 1° the chute d’eau 2° le gaz d’éclairage by Duchamp, a work kept secret by its author, are indeed delirious machines. At this date, Gamarra belongs to the world of the most vibrant and international art.
It is clearly evident what this new situation changes in his painting. Since 1963, he tried the experiment of intense color in P 63101 and P 63 54. In the latter, the flying machine appears striped with colored bands, enhanced with red and blue lines. It is no longer a pictogram within a complex composition, but the entire work signed in purple letters as visible as the sequence of capital A’s that crosses the surface horizontally. It is not very adventurous to deduce that the painting is in the process of mutation. The Inventario (1964) leaves no doubt on this point, nor does El Avión (1965) or the painting called Revolución de colores, a title that is equivalent to a manifesto. Other paintings do not have titles, but they are just as explicit: P 65778, P 66503, P66513, P 66514, P 66511. Always more planes, helicopters, flags, palm trees with striped trunks. Homenaje à Jean Prouvé (1968) adds a more modest machine, the bicycle. And at the same time, more and more bright blues, yellows, oranges, greens: an abundance of intense, vividly thrown colors, the likes of which had not been seen since the COBRA group twenty years earlier.
The sobriety of the beginning of the decade is forgotten and, for a while, the painting becomes playful, whimsical or mocking. In addition to machines, it welcomes insects, snakes, indefinable quadrupeds and “men” halfway between graffiti, childish drawing and memories of Joan Miro. It seems impossible to make sense of these shimmering arrangements, just as it is impossible to describe them. They abound in hybrid forms, half organic and half mechanical. They are sometimes strewn with letters and numbers that one would not know what to say. Not only is the artist totally liberated from the authority of abstraction, but also from any relationship of subjection to the history of art, its principles and its uses. He allows himself everything, and especially not to be serious. The title of a painting from 1971 could define this moment: L’île enchantée. Unless one prefers La pesca del límite and its clouds of insect-machines flying over a fiercely blue ocean.
Paintings of contemporary history
All would be enjoyment and freedom. But another painting begins to appear, not against, but in the one that dazzles with its colors and inventions. The change can be seen in paintings such as La poursuite infernale (1967), El progrès programmé (1969), El progreso de una ayuda (1969) or A propósito de vías de comunicación (1971). El progreso de una ayuda and El progrès programmé have the same subject and composition: on a landscape of palm trees and tropical forests falls a rain of bullies, guns, bombs, tanks and machine guns. It falls from a US Air Force bomber and three helicopters that are no longer funny toys. It spills over an opulent and virgin nature, inhabited by an anaconda and black monkeys. The political allegory is transparent and the date of two paintings confirms that they are no longer artistic, but political and tragic. Brazil lived under a military dictatorship from the coup d’état of March 31, 1964, led by Marshal Castelo Blanco, with republican institutions being systematically dismantled. In 1972, Uruguay was declared to be in a state of war by its government, and handed the power to the military after the coup d’état of June 27, 1973, which opened a period of repression of all opposition, arrests followed by torture and assassinations committed by “death squads” in the country and abroad. A few months later, on September 11, 1973, a coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, who died in the Moneda Palace bombed by the coup plotters. In Argentina, on March 24, 1976, a military junta, including General Jorge Videla, overthrew Isabel Martinez de Perón, widow since 1974 of General Juan Perón.
El Progreso de una Ayuda cannot be understood without remembering the “aid” – ayuda – that the United States pours in the form of weapons, “technical advisors” lent by the CIA and dollar funds to conduct these meetings to take the power and to carry out policies of elimination of those designated as seditious, revolutionaries, communists, enemies of the Church and the capital. Estudio para un paisaje de América latina (1971), under a seemingly innocuous title, combines in the form of an allegorical landscape most of the signs that appear, separately or together, in the compositions of the following years. Once again, Gamarra invents a visual vocabulary for himself: the North American arms shipments literally falling from the sky; the car marked with the skull of a “death squad” of policemen or paramilitaries; the international corporations that demand social order in order to carry out their mining, oil or agribusiness activities, here indicated by a kind of gimlet digging into a hill, the pipelines and factory chimneys. The scene is supposed to be set in Brazil, judging from the Brazilian flag that partly covers a black pipe and the silhouette of the colossal Christ the Redeemer perched at the top of the Corcovado above Rio de Janeiro. But this Christ does not bless. He stretches out his left arm and seems to be pointing at something – a finger that we want to believe is accusatory. In the foreground, on a monumental military boot, a black sphere is balanced: bomb or football ball? But isn’t football one of the most powerful “opiums of the people”, that distracts from any critical thought? And isn’t Guerra y Futbol the title of a great drawing from 1970, the year after the so-called “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras, against the backdrop of agrarian reform and the defense of its privileges by the United Fruit Company, which is accustomed to such actions throughout the continent?
If this “paysage d’Amérique latine” shows the most complete nomenclature of Gamarra’s symbols, they are found in lesser density in many of his paintings: Reniflant niobium (1972), La panamericana del Desarrollo (1973) -whose title operates by antiphrasis- , A Amazonia e seus misterios (1973), Connaissances scientifiques et techniques y Méhtodes combines (1974) , O petróleo e nosso, Hanna Mining, Extensión progressive and the twilight Los limites del desarollo (1975). The inventory would continue until Anaconda Copper Mining, 1977, Bien aventurado (1979) and Le Grand lessivage (1980) where the helicopter-scorpion-spider that destroys the rainbow is found ten years after its appearance in La La última palmera and Asedio. It should still include the preparatory drawings for these compositions and those that accompany them without preparing them, including astonishing pseudo-scientific diagrams for a weapon or a geological section.
The formation of this very particular pictorial language would deserve a longer study. It is indeed remarkable that Gamarra does not use visual elements of photographic, advertisement or other origin. If we make a comparison with American and British pop, the New Realism and the Figuration Narrative in France, the difference is obvious. The artists who belong to this international movement compose either from photography – Warhol, Hamilton, Richter, Rosler etc. – or from comics – Lichtenstein – or, most often, by combining these sources – Rauschenberg, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, Polke, Erro, Telemaque etc. If we stick to the Parisian context, which is Gamarra’s since 1963 onwards, these samplings of representative visual samples are one of the most frequent modes of creation of the Figuration Narrative, from Klasen to Monory and Rancillac. It is even more intriguing that Gamarra, unlike these artists whose work he knows, sticks to drawing and painting and, through them, makes easily identifiable but schematized signs appear. Gamarra constitutes a complete visual lexicon and thus it becomes possible for him to enunciate satirical political reflections and gives himself the means to paint history, but a history painting that is neither descriptive nor narrative: allegorical, distanced, operating in the manner of a rebus or a fable. Sala oscura de tortura, 1972 is the only exception to this way of painting that we are able to cite. It represents with an almost photographic realism a naked woman lying on her back, blindfolded, wrists and ankles tied, an electric cable inserted in her mouth. The torturer burns her skin and her pubic hair with a cigarette. The truth of the scene is beyond any doubt. Such abuses have been inflicted all over the world, including Latin America. Here, Gamarra practices an explicitly tragic realism. But this exception only makes him more aware of his profound singularity: in all his other political paintings he bears witness to tragic and murderous events without conceding anything to the tragic or the macabre.
One would expect dark tones, pathetic chiaroscuros, overwhelming darkness. On the contrary, the chromatisms are lively, clear, sometimes acid. The landscapes are mostly bathed in a luminous daylight and the nocturnes are rare. One would expect snapshots of riots and executions, views of burned villages and mass graves. None of that is seen, except in L’attaque aérienne (1974). The pampas and the forest are the most frequent settings, overflown and traversed by the machines of death, pierced by mines and quarries, but these actions are indicated according to the artist’s own lexicon. A red and white striped anaconda occasionally shows up, but it looks more like something out of a children’s book than the jungle. The only animal explicitly persecuted is a white horse, attacked by molosses as early as 1970 in Siempre en la lucha, captured by monkeys in A propósito de vías de comunicación and again by primates, this time dressed in uniforms and armed with guns, in La panamericana del desarrollo. But Gamarra does not make it the only motif in this composition, not even the main one: it is one of the elements of an abundant visual statement in which the construction crane and the giant scarlet excavator, the convoy of automatic rifles and trucks covered in bright red and turquoise camouflage and the plantations lined up participate, all under a light blue and gray sky. The tension is therefore extreme between what is suggested – the overexploitation of resources, the omnipresent military order, the repression of all freedom – and the pictorial means, the intensity of the colors, the absurdity of a shimmering camouflage and the Gauguin-like pink of a palm tree trunk. There is a flagrant discordance between the tragedy of the subject and its treatment and this tension gives the work all its power.
Chronicles of a lost America
In 1981, La Petite histoire de l’Amérique latine appeared as a summary of the historical painting that Gamarra had been developing for over a decade. But it is also one of its last manifestations. For some years now, a new style has been emerging. In A vissage découvert (1977), Los perros (1978) or El retorno del cacique Yamandú (1979), the painter amplifies what was already apparent in several parts of paintings such Connaissances techniques et scientifiques (1975) or Extension progressive (1975): an increasing attention to a detailed pictorial representation, attentive to the peculiarities of the vegetal motifs at first, and then of the whole of the constitutive elements. Once again, Gamarra changes. At the risk of disconcerting, he seems to become a realist, for landscapes in which the eye of a botanist would identify the species and the geographer the types of reliefs. Los Aguasfiestas (1980) is like a panorama, all the more vast because it is observed from a high point, as if from a bird’s-eye view, and the groups of people and horses occupy only a small strip along the lower edge of the canvas, which has the effect of further enlarging the visual field. To this day, the representation of nature has not ceased to preoccupy Gamarra and it would be futile to list examples. His dexterity allows him to play with the smallest details and with all shades of green, ochre and brown. He thus seems to be part of an art history to which one would have thought him foreign: that of the European painters who worked in Brazil, in the 17th century the Dutchmen Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, then, in the 19th century, the Frenchmen Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and his son Félix Emile. Except for a few details, Midi (1984) or Paysage from 1984 with lake and immense sky would be tributes to these inventors of Latin American landscape painting by their distant descendant Gamarra. The same would be true of more recent paintings, El sueño de Ícaro (2001) Charmes (2004) or Le Regard de l’Aleijadinho (2020).
Except for a few details, it is already written. Essential details. In each of these landscapes, one or more figures and sometimes objects are half hidden or better shown and, for some reason, they should not be there, neither separately nor together. This is how Gamarra’s painting operates, according to the configuration whose resources he has been developing for four decades now. To simplify, it consists of two types of representation, both drawn and painted with the same precision. The landscape, constituting the essence of the work, extending over the whole of its surface, more or less open, more or less luminous. Inside this one, there are human and animal figures and machines too, most often of a reduced scale, but nevertheless easily identifiable and just as precisely painted. However, their presence in the landscape quickly reveals itself to be incongruous, sometimes absurd. Their irruption changes what would otherwise be a charming view of a forest or a river into a scene that must be interpreted by the mind from what the view provides. The subject is inscribed in their relationship, and this subject is all the more important because, in this way, Gamarra develops over time a historical, political and cultural reflection on Latin America through the ages, before and after its conquest by the expeditions from Spain and Portugal. This part of his work forms one of the most important artistic corpus of today on this history and its consequences. It was said earlier that, with his vocabulary of colorful pictograms, Gamarra was a painter of history in the 1970s. He has since become a painter of other stories, through other plastic means, thus remaining in the continuity of his previous approach while renewing its form and function.
This corpus is too abundant to be examined in its entirety. It is therefore necessary to limit ourselves to an analysis of the main issues of these paintings. Three themes dominate: the history of the conquest of Indian America from Christopher Columbus onwards, the Western domination of the entire continent up to the present day, the acculturation of the Indian populations and the destruction of their myths. They are inseparable, domination and acculturation being the consequences of the invasion. Also, these subjects appear sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. Their appearances are not ordered by a chronological order that would determine periods: there are recurrences, sometimes separated by intervals of several years, and moments when such and such a motif tends to become obsessive, then soon withdraws from the scene. The coherence of the whole is so tight that each canvas is caught in a network of meanings, allusions and references, and all of them are connected, respond to each other and seem destined to come together and form a single work, whose execution began four decades ago and continues today.
This great work begins as a story. The primitive scene could only be that of L’arrivée du conquistador, painted in 1981: a boat with sails marked with the cross enters an estuary or bay and three Indians observe it, one of whom already has his bow bandaged. The same motif is treated in a lighter, almost comic way in Las tentaciones de Hernán Cortés (1981), temptations embodied by two feathered putti, one of them armed with an Indian blowpipe, in the presence of the blue-headed anaconda with a red and white striped body from the previous works and destined to a remarkable longevity. The arrival of the Europeans is again the motif of La incógnita (1982), before Gamarra moves on to the later episodes of the invasion. En busca del Dorado (1982) and El mito del Dorado (1990) refer to the search for gold and a city paved with it. In Urutau (1983), Quetzalcóatl (1988), 1519 – Quetzalcóatl (1989), Reconquista y misiones (1992) and,recently Encuentro (2021), the Spaniards are on horseback, helmeted and armed with pikes and swords, while the Indians, when present, are naked and armed only with bows. Por el amor a las frutas (1989-90) is inspired by a passage with the same title in the first volume – Nacimientos – by Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del Fuego, to which other works also refer and which is cited in the catalogs of several exhibitions: the hero is a certain Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the place Santa Marian del Darien and the year 1514. If it is specified, it is for the sake of example: Gamarra’s work has solid historical foundations, like Galeano’s work. The first contact between Indians and Europeans is also the subject of El Oráculo (1992), and even more so of El Requerimiento. An Indian man, a woman and a jaguar slowly enter the forest, moving away from the village or monastery built by the invaders. The “requirement” is the papal declaration that had to be read to the Indians to make them hear an abridgement of Genesis and to announce that they were now under the authority of the pope and, therefore, summoned to convert to Christianity. We know what this will determined of abuses and massacres on the whole continent. An observation already made about Gamarra’s political works of the 1970s is thus imposed again: he chooses to represent the worst historical facts not by pathos, but by ellipsis and litote. These Indians go into hiding so as not to have to choose between denial and extermination in the name of Christ. In the same way, in Prémonitions (2002), the Indian turns his back to the clearing where three soldiers and a missionary carrying a cross are advancing on their mounts. Migraciones (2004-05) suggests what must happen: the village burns and a couple of Indians and their dog cross the river on fallen logs to escape from those who claim to bring them the “true faith. El Requerimiento and Migraciones are generic scenes: in them, the story is concentrated in a single scene.
So that’s how it all began. What happened afterwards and until the end of the 20th century were the consequences and repetitions of the episodes of the colonial conquest because history never ends. The 1990 painting Encuentro de conquistadores should have been classified among the scenes of the 16th century if, in the upper left corner, a combat helicopter was not flying over the jungle where a rider in black armor followed by dogs is advancing: the encounter is less between him and a group of Indians than between this armored conquistador and the modern war machine. Anachronism? In the first degree, certainly; but, in the second, who would deny that the military dictatorships of Latin America, whose generals are descendants of European families and whose action is supported by the United States, do not act differently than Cortés and his lieutenants, by force? This is not an anachronism but a temporal shortcut. There are others. In 1981 Convergences brings together in a falsely fanciful mode Saint George, the anaconda – dead, in the role of the dragon – and a soldier brandishing an automatic weapon. Mimetismo (1982), Cinq siècles d’orage (1983) -an Indian and a supersonic fighter plane-, La main dans la main, 1985 -a soldier of the 16th century and a GI-, Los Atalayas (1992) -an Indian and his jaguar brother looking at Rio de Janeiro and its buildings-, L’Annonciateur (1992) – an airship crosses the sky and a tattooed cacique opens his arms as if to welcome it, –El Espejito (1993) – an Indian, a conquistador and a helicopter-, Survey, 1996 with an airship again or Merco Sur (1999) – a biplane pulls a banner in the name of this economic system and two ghostly Indians look at it – : this inventory is incomplete, so much Gamarra imagined variations on this principle. In 2003, he gives one of the most refined versions: an Indian, a toucan and an anteater in the foreground, on the edge of an admirable forest, so dense that it seems impenetrable. But the cursed helicopter passes over the foliage. Make no mistake, warns the title. Too late.
Indian America has been destroyed over the centuries. Radical and definitive transformations have taken place. By simplifying a little, they are of two orders, distinct and complementary: what concerns the economic and the political – of the bodies- and what concerns the cultural and the religious – of the spirits.
The paintings of the political and the economic are situated in the continuity of the symbolic landscapes of the decade 1970. The overexploitation of natural resources, to which Galeano devoted his probably best-known book, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971), is suggested by the periscope in Prospection in 1990, an intruder in a paradise of waterfalls and bushes, by the factory chimney spitting its smoke over the forest in Pollution (1999), and by the chimney that gushes out of the water at the junction of two pipelines in Echappée belle (2011). We had already seen it in 1981 in Le grand lessivage. A cargo ship goes up the river to a cattle ranch in Five minutes before (2006) and a train follows the river, watched by an Indian and an ocelot: it’s Al Sur (2010). What we call technical progress and industrial development is first of all destruction of places and people.
They are carried out in the name of the interests of multinationals and US imperialism. To verify this, it is enough to refer to Last notice (1994) which makes us suspect the expulsion of Indians threatened by the helicopter-scorpion that an indigenous Icarus tries to flee. We find the subject again in the more explicit Escenificación (1998), in the ironic Mea Culpa (2000), in Operación Coca (2001) – helicopters killing the rainbow and a commando landing in the jungle – and in the only painting where Gamarra is demonstrative, God save America (2004). The condor carries a man in its talons. It is tempting to read an allusion to Operation Condor, the code name for the campaign of kidnappings and assassinations of political opponents undertaken jointly in the 1970s by the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay with the support of the CIA. In 1983, De la serie d’agressiones masquées was a more literal representation of this: a nun’s throat slit with a machete, masked foot soldiers, one of the very few crime scenes that Gamarra painted together with Sala oscura de tortura. In 1990 he took up the bloody motif again.
The other ravages are invisible: forced conversions, prohibition of rituals and festivals, oblivion of ancient myths. How to paint them? Gauguin succeeded in Oceania by portraying vahines forced to wear long dresses, melancholic and idle, deprived of dances and songs. Gamarra proceeds in a different way: by inserting exemplary figures and objects of modernity in places and situations where their presence means that the ancient mental world of the Indians has been penetrated and polluted by the West. How else to explain that in the two versions of Los Mandingas (1992 and 1996), Superman leads the dugout whose passengers are a soldier of Cortés, Christ, a devil with a trident and two dogs? In the first one, barely visible, another dugout carries Indians from the past, but the one in the foreground gathers passengers from Europe and the United States. Superman returns in Déjeuner en forêt (1998). Another invader has the ridiculous features of Mickey Mouse: he appears in the company of a penitent wearing a black hood in La segunda muerte de Solís (1995), a reinterpretation of the death of Juan Diaz de Solis, a Spanish navigator killed by Indians in 1516 in the Rio de la Plata region. Walt Disney’s mouse returned in 1997 in La Chasse as an assassin watching Icarus, and in 2000 in Pandora, during a shoot in the jungle protected by automatic weapons. This staging of the Westernization of the spirits is even more explicit in two key paintings: Murmullos en la selva (1997) and Yesterday Today (2007). These are portraits of groups: clergymen, present-day and past military men on their steeds, Superman, businessmen and a helicopter over the trees. In the right corner of Yesterday Today – a rather clear title – some Indians are sitting in front of a screen: Hollywood films, manufactured images.
To the soldiers, the religious and the industrialists, Gamarra adds another class of sacrilegious intruders. They do not pretend to conquer lands -that is already done-, nor to convert pagans -that is also already done-, but to observe what would remain of the natives still free of the effects of colonization. One recognizes here the fantasy of the “first contact” dear to the ethnologists. The explorer’s land-rover goes up the river on a raft: Iniciation à l’ Anthropologie (1984), with its statue of a zoomorphic god behind the branches. The motif is found again in Arrivé au Crepuscule (1998) and, more allusively and ironically, in Sur les pas de Fawcett (1999), which refers to the explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 in the Upper Xingu, where he was searching for a lost city. Whether or not the ethnologist is a voyeur and an agent of colonization, these facts are recalled by Regards (1999), Le Photographe (2002) and again by the strange En attendant (2009), in which a video surveillance camera films an Indian hunting birds with a bow.
There is therefore almost nothing left, traces that are fading, myths that are being forgotten. But there is still painting, the only thing that can resurrect the lost past – at least on the canvas and in the imagination of the viewer. Remember warns the audience: Remember. Remember what? Of the time when the mermaid played with the jaguar and the blue parrot perched on the hand of the cacique. A couple of explorers with colonial helmets walk on the other side of the stream but they do not disturb the mermaid nor the cacique, who do not see them. This brings us to the other half of the paintings that have occupied Gamarra for forty years, those in which the legendary and the magical return, saved from disappearance by painting. This part of his creation responds to the one that has just been studied, opposes it and consoles it, so to speak.
They began together. L’arrivée del conquistador dates from 1981, but the fabulous El retorno del Cacique Yamandú was painted in 1979 and Gran Angulo, with jaguar and white bird, in 1982. Immediately afterwards came the mysterious El Anunciador, Boomerang II and Liens (1983), Quetzal (1983-84), Une certaine atmosphère and Le guet (1984). After the fish woman, the bird man: Le vol risqué du condor des Andes (1986) for the one, Sur (1987) for the other. The mermaid reappears at irregular intervals, a fantastic and seductive creature from the time men believed that such creatures existed, the time of L’inaccesible Eden (1987), of which Idylle (1992) and Absalon (2001-02) are the paradisiacal visions. Works such as Quetzal y Chajá (1991), La Malquerida and Message urgent (1995), Eden and De caza in 1996, Buenas Maneras and Le four rire (2000), El sueño de Icaro and L’intrigue (2001), Welcome to Paradise (2003) or Charmes (2004) offer to the eye landscapes untouched by any unwelcome presence and Indians who ignore priests and colonists. When Gamarra nevertheless introduces a few disturbing signs, they are of the order of the dreamlike and the playful: the anaconda is hardly worrying. In Rives (2008), as in Remember, there is a white explorer, but he will not be able to cross the torrential river that separates him from the other world, that of the Indians and the gods who inhabit their statues. In Amigos y Expectative, paintings from 2021, he has disappeared. In the first, the mermaid, a young Indian woman and the jaguar live in harmony. In the second, a rainbow undulates between the trees and three Indians and a feline follow it with their eyes, a magical apparition.
At the heart of this attempt to restore life and strength to what has been defiled is the brief series of works from the late 1980s in which Gamarra renews Gauguin’s attempt in Oceania. Since there was only poor debris of the “ancient mahori cult” left in Tahiti and the Marquesas, Gauguin took from the travelers’ accounts the elements necessary to reconstruct this cult and the mythologies attached to it. Since there is little left of the religions and cosmogonies of the Amerindian populations, Gamarra asked Galeano’s historical sum for stories that he put into paint: La yerba mate (1988-89) based on the legend of the appearance of mate, a gift of the moon to a poor peasant, La resurrección del Urutau, the bird into which the princess Neambiu metamorphosed because the man she loved had died, the appearance of Autoridad in Tierra del Fuego when “the men killed all the women and put on the masks they had invented to terrify them. ” On the birth of La Guerre he figures the last moment when “the daughter of the condor made a passage among the big and ugly birds” and saved the only survivor of a massacre. In La Pluie, he retains the moment when “the birds of thunder” appear: “With lightning and lightning, they attacked the rocky mountain, delivered the captive and killed the snakes.
It is difficult to see to which of his contemporaries Gamarra could be compared to when, in his studio in Arcueil, in the suburbs of a modern metropolis, he manages to make us penetrate for a moment in the time and space of myths. The word enchantment is imposed, in all the senses that are his. In other words, in the words of the poet Edouard Glissant, in 1985: “The painting of José Gamarra is thus a mythical primer where we learn to unravel to root, our common certainties. The part of the dream is inseparable from what we ourselves embrace in that space.
Philippe DAGEN, February 2022, Paris.
Historian of Contemporary Art
Professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Art critic for the newspaper Le Monde
Translated into English from French
