An unforgettable paintings at this yr’s Venice Biennale captivates guests lengthy earlier than they step foot within the Giardini or the Arsenale. Gazing out from Venice’s vaporetti, the long-lasting public water buses that ferry passengers throughout the greenish lagoon, are the eyes of Cecilia Vicuña’s mom. As guests disembark on the aquatic metropolis’s buoyant docks towards a soundscape of gurgles and splashes and churning motors, they appear on patiently, deep brown wells of gentleness and depth. A 97-year-old girl stares again. These are her eyes; she traveled to Venice to see them, greater than 4 many years after her daughter painted them.
“Bendígame Mamita” (“Bless Me, Mommy”) dates from 1977, when Vicuña was dwelling in Bogotá, and it has since then hung within the relative obscurity of her mom Norma Ramírez’s home. Now it’s reproduced all through the Biennale, not simply on the vaporetti however on posters and signage, and the work itself is on view within the Central Pavilion, the place the composition will be appreciated in its entirety. “I suffered very a lot when the portray disappeared,” Ramírez admitted in an interview from Venice, remembering the day when the canvas left her house. “However seeing it right here, I perceive that it couldn’t simply be for me. It needed to be for everybody.”
The work portrays Ramírez suspended in a celestial expanse, her face bisected by the sinuous curve of a guitar whose round chamber exposes one eye. She disencumbers herself of her high-heeled footwear as her locks movement freely. Hovering above, frieze-like vignettes narrate moments from Ramírez’s life up till her eldest daughter’s departure from Chile on the point of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, when Vicuña was pressured into exile in London; within the portray, the artist drifts away in a rivulet of blood. Years later, the 2 have been reunited in Colombia for the primary time since they parted methods, a scene additionally memorialized within the piece — in one other vignette, they’re standing facet by facet, beaming, Vicuña holding a paintbrush.
“My mother arrived and together with her presence and her go to, I recovered a actuality that the coup had taken from me: the unstoppable, indestructible happiness of the love between a mom and daughter,” mentioned Vicuña. “She got here from struggling, loss of life, and horror in Chile, and I from exile and excessive poverty, and but this encounter was such an absolute pleasure, a pleasure that radiated.”
In a last episode, illustrated on the prime of the canvas, an eight-year-old Vicuña poses together with her mom’s arm round her, the 2 linking fingers. It’s based mostly on {a photograph} Vicuña has at all times carried together with her, of particular significance as a result of it depicts them in a symbiotic embrace, “as if we have been a single unit.”
“Then, my mother turns into a guitar that sings,” Vicuña continued. “However the guitar is a prisoner and even in its sorrow, in that jail of the dictatorship, her physique takes the type of a whirlwind of ardour and love, and he or she kicks off her footwear. And he or she is dance itself.” Despite her severe gaze and a drooping flower in her hand, Ramírez — whom Vicuña and her siblings nicknamed la reina del mambo as a result of she “danced like a serpent” — exudes a way of dynamic motion.
“Bendígame Mamita” is among the few works by Vicuña that survived from this era: Greater than half of the work she made within the Sixties and ’70s, most of which she gifted to family and friends, have been misplaced or discarded. However two folks held on to them — her mom and her brother Ricardo, each of whom joined Vicuña in Venice.
The story of the portray’s passage to Italy was additionally serendipitous. Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Biennale’s 59th version, had requested collaborating artists to submit works depicting eyes for the exhibition’s graphic identification. Vicuña’s was certainly one of 4 chosen, together with items by Belkis Ayón, Felipe Baeza, and Tatsuo Ikeda. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Biennale’s highest honor, and her survey exhibition on the Guggenheim Museum, Cecilia Vicuña: Spin Spin Triangulene, opened a month later. It is, reasonably unbelievably, the Chilean artist and poet’s first solo present in a New York museum.
A tribute to the credo of motherly love, “Bendígame Mamita,” fathomed from the ache of separation and the elation of reunification, can also be a cri de cœur towards displacement, certainly one of battle’s silent reverberations. Tens of hundreds have been tortured, imprisoned, or killed beneath Pinochet’s 17-year regime; numerous others remoted and exiled.
“That’s my portrait,” Vicuña concludes matter-of-factly. “It’s a rebel towards the dreadful struggling of oppression.”
“It’s a fantastic portray,” mentioned Ramírez. “Comprised of a wonderful inspiration, made with tenderness and creativity.”
Vicuña pauses. “Gracias, mamita.“
