Present history – to venture an oxymoron– inhabits Diana Dowek's art at an odd slant. At times, the drama of incidents of political violence appears metaphorically; at other times, it makes itself known more directly. There are barbed wires, corpses, bullet holes, small weapons obscure figures are wielding; images fraught with a historicity that draws up back to dire times. At moments desolation is the key note in a human landscape the terror of which is shown unsparingly. Anyone who peers into this rearview mirror glimpses an immediate past: it is at once history and a stalking of the present. And if what is visualized is proffered in the form of some sinister threat – a body lying on the highway, a car in hot pursuit – the meaning the scene constructs urges on painful reflection that admits of a twofold reading. For something is going on in Dowek's pieces, something that refutes the ominous charge of her visions, in that they always suggest a hopeful resolution to the social conflict they render with such raw realism. The fence wire's cut open; someone's managed to escape. The pursuers move off, or fall behind. A woman cuts through the countryside. At any rate, the point of suture of historical catastrophe is made manifest in an iconic piece like Lo que vendrá [What's to Come] (recently acquired by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) or in the series Pinturas de la insurrección [Paintings of the Insurrection,] from the shattering year of 1973. As in history, in the quasi-cinematic sequence Dowek narrates, crowds take to the streets to exercise their right to protest. They are the sovereign people, silhouetted as they move, like shades without identity, and they anticipate the disappearance of many at the hands of the forces of repression. And yet they are a people that walks toward a setting for combat in which an epic passion overwhelms and overcomes the dangers fate deals it. With this exhibition the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes brings to the public a group of works of extraordinary artistic and political power, enormously relevant to our national visual culture; and it pays homage to one of Argentina's fundamental artists, one whose labor over more than five decades has never slackened. Andrés Duprat Director Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes