Figuras

The body and the face constitute two the central motifs in the work of Chilean artist Gracia Barrios. Her approach to the affective and cultural encoding of bodies and physical appearance reflects on the relationship between the rise of mass media culture in the 1960s and the visual and aesthetic languages mobilized by the popular and social movements of this turbulent decade. Barrios’ artistic practice was directly impacted by her participation in the violent events carried out by the Chilean military dictatorship. Yet, her work does not aim to provide a graphic documentation of events or stand as mere representation of subjects, but to subvert and critique media culture and the construction of political and social subjectivities through an active reflection on processes of picture and image making. These aesthetic investigations, which she began to develop as a member of the avant-garde Chilean art collective Signo, led her to fuse and combine radically opposed artistic tendencies such as Pop art and gestural abstraction. In “Figuras,” two blurred figures are linked by red lipstick. The act of applying make-up resonates with the convulsive and repetitive scratching gesture disfiguring the bodies painted on the canvas. The act of applying make-up is also a metaphor for an act of covering up or masking something. Further, the soft and muted tones of pastel paint evoking innocence is in strong contrast with the sexual inuendo of the fully exposed red lip crayon. Rather than define gender categories, the application of make-up, much like the application of paint onto a surface, is conceived as an act where all distinctions between violence and passivity collapse.