By Fausto Triana
Probably absorbed by the narrative of the time, names such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Otto Mueller or the Cuban Wifredo Lam, appear in the inventory of oil paintings and sculptures that will be open to the public until next October 20 .
Some works are self-congratulatory, others indifferent, a group, with a questioning intention, and in the confrontation with current events, a change in the narrative.
In the heart of Paseo del Prado, the collections of the Thyseen-Bornemisza Museum of this capital presented this Monday the “vernisage” of the exhibition Colonial memory, which summarizes in 75 works the view of plastic artists on the reality of the territories colonized by Europe centuries ago. back.
By Picasso there is “Study for the head of Nude with Cloths”; Gauguin can be seen with the sculpture “Girl’s Head” and the painting “Comings and Goings” from Martinique; Brueghel teaches “The Garden of Eden,” which he conceived with Rubens; Mueller with “Two female nudes in a landscape”; and Wifredo Lam excels in “Female Bust”.
Curated by Juan Angel López-Manzanares, curator of the Thyssen-Bornemisza and director of the project, Alba Campo, the Chilean Andrea Pacheco and the Colombian Yeison F. García, the exhibition addresses the role of museums and the works they house within the Eurocentric narrative .
What the paintings hide is more important than what they reveal; With this exhibition the narrative is turned around and the invisible facts are the protagonists as part of a process of justice of knowledge, commented the curators of the exhibition.
To leave no doubt about the disturbing scope we are looking into, along with the name displayed on a wall, Colonial memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections, a huge painting by the Dutch painter Frans Hals points the way.
This is “Family Group before a Landscape” (1635-1648), supposedly from the family of Jacob Ruychaver, general director of Elmina Castle, Ghana, and an African teenager hired as a servant.
Divided into segments, the exhibition encompasses Extrativism and Appropriation; The racial construction of the “other”; Slavery and colonial domination; Escape to new arcadias; Body and sexuality; and Resistance, Cimarronaje and civil rights.
In all sections it establishes a kind of dialogue with the contemporary and the way in which the colonial perspective may have changed, although not radically.
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