Arman shows anti-war manifesto with works by Goya, Demián Flores and Vlady

The Vlady Center of the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM) inaugurated on Thursday an exhibition that, beyond the artistic, seeks to establish itself as a manifesto against warspecifically “against the massacre of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people.

But we also want peace between Russia, Ukraine and NATO, because in that war we see a warlike and terrifying horizon for humanity.said Fernando Gálvez de Aguinaga, curator along with Silvia Vázquez Solsona and Tonatiuh Gallardo.

Peace also for a Mexico that was trapped in the war against drug trafficking, launched by Felipe Calderón and headed by a criminal who worked as an interested party in at least one of the criminal groups he claimed to fight.

Is about Goya, Demián Flores and Vlady: Against warwith which this museum documentation and experimentation center, which will turn 17 on June 21, continues the celebrations for the designation as an artistic monument of the work of Vladimir Kibálchich Rusakov (1920-2005), carried out last year, said the general secretary of the UACM, Alberto Benítez.

In it the 80 engravings of the series dialogue The disasters of war, by the Spanish Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828); the paraphrase of 83 pieces made from that series by the Juchiteco Demián Flores (1971), with the title Collateral disastersand about 60 works by the Russian-Mexican Vlady about violence and barbarism.

In the words of Fernando Gálvez, also coordinator of the Vlady Center, it is an example that, Unfortunately, it is astonishingly valid, and although the works of the included artists refer to different historical moments, it seems that they are talking about Palestine, Ukraine or the drug trafficking massacres in Guanajuato.

Vázquez Solsona said that in the rooms you can find a dialogue between the past, present and future that is woven from human folly and violence, which have systematically sustained the forms of terror that constitute and consolidate the various forms of authoritarian power.

He considered that exhibiting Goya’s work, in addition to being an honor, is a great opportunity to live closely with that greatness of painting, drawing and engraving, who opened the door to the ways of looking and representing that gave the guidelines to modern art.

He stressed that in The disasters of warominous experience with which the Spanish artist captured terror, It surpassed any fantasy and the harsh reality is presented between perpetrators and victims, where the unreason of violence reigns and there are no good or bad, only death and hopelessness..

By qualifying forceful Flores’ works, the specialist pointed out that the Juchiteco artist “not only appeals to the iconographic model of The disasters of war of Goya, but rather he appropriates it through our history and bequeaths us a vestige of a barbarism that we cannot yet put an end to.”

Vázquez Solsona indicated that Vlady’s pieces They immerse us in revolutions and counter-revolutions where the heroic dissidents who take power are corrupted by it..

In his opinion, from notebook one, in which Vlady copies Goya’s self-portrait that corresponds to the first of Whims, until the end of his days, “we see that in his work there is a deep learning from who he himself called a cursed painter. We consider it important not only to highlight his lessons about unreason and violence, but also elements such as his studies to The naked maja or satirical in nature that are close to the proposal initiated by the Spanish artist.”

Warehouse series

Demián Flores pointed out that the series Collateral disasters It had been in storage for more than 10 years, after being exhibited in 2012 at the City Museum and traveling to other spaces until 2013. He added that he made those engravings because it was impossible not to face the reality that we were experiencing during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón. That war against drug trafficking that he started was an absurd thing.

He clarified that, in principle, he was not trying to paraphrase Goya’s engravings; However, when he warned that the Spanish artist’s images were timelessthe same ones that were seen in the newspapers at that time, what he did was speak from the same place where he had finished them to add the historical and symbolic situations of the war that was being experienced in Mexico.

These engravings keep the same format, the same technique that Goya used. The complication is that I used certain strategies from the drawing itself so that you couldn’t see where his hand ended and mine began, or vice versa.he added.

The exhibition will remain until September 13 at the Goya 63 venue, Insurgentes Mixcoac neighborhood. Fernando Gálvez dedicates it to his friend Jean Cadet Odimba, lawyer and human rights defender murdered on June 5 in Michoacán.