There are exhibitions that challenge our certainties about what constitutes true art. The Beatriz González retrospective at the Barbican Centre belongs to this rare category. Faced with the 150 works by the Colombian artist, our Western gaze, accustomed to the codes of contemporary art, wavers. Here is a creator who has made assumed bad taste a weapon of mass destruction against social hypocrisy.

Beatriz González has never hidden her sources. Chromolithographs, religious images, tourist postcards, magazine advertisements: everything that scholarly art despises becomes essential raw material for her. Since the 1960s, she has unabashedly plundered mass imagery to turn it against itself. The result strikes with its muted violence, this way she has of exploding dominant aesthetic codes from within.

At the Barbican, her “furniture-paintings” occupy the space with a troubling presence. These beds, chests of drawers, tables painted with diverted romantic scenes belong neither to traditional sculpture nor painting. They invent their own category, that of an art that refuses distanced contemplation to infiltrate domestic intimacy. González understands a truth that Western art has long ignored: beauty is not decreed, it is negotiated daily.

This strategy resonates strangely with my own practice of the resistant studio, this necessity to create against the forces that try to divert us from the essential. The irreversibility of India ink finds an echo here in the irreversibility of González’s gesture: once she seizes an image, she transforms it definitively.

Violence in Festive Garb

Beatriz González’s strength lies in her ability to reveal the violence that seeps beneath the smooth surface of popular imagery. Her reproductions of press photos, transposed into the acidic colors of commercial kitsch, produce a stunning effect. Violent death adorns itself with the hues of shampoo advertising, creating a profound unease that says more about our era than many manifestos.

The Barbican exhibition particularly highlights this period of the 1980s-90s, when Colombia was sinking into the spiral of drug-related violence. González then develops her “Apolínea” series, where she meticulously reproduces photos of victims published in the press, but treating them with the visual codes of popular religious imagery. The sacred and profane collide in an aesthetic shock of rare power.

This approach to violence through visual détournement finds a troubling echo in my own relationship to radical black and white. Where my India inks seek truth in the brutality of contrast, González hunts it down in color excess. Two opposite paths toward the same urgency: to speak the unspeakable of our era.

What fascinates about Beatriz González is her ability to invent an artistic language that speaks simultaneously to the masses and the cultural elite, without ever falling into easy populism. She achieves this tour de force by perfectly mastering the codes she subverts. Trained at the Fine Arts of Bogotá, she intimately knows the history of Western art, but deliberately chooses to turn away from it to draw from the imagery of her era and territory.

At the Barbican, her early works from the 1960s reveal this strategy in gestation. By appropriating reproductions of old masters sold in souvenir shops, she already operates this particular alchemy that transforms degraded copy into original work. González anticipates by several decades contemporary questions about authenticity in the age of digital reproduction.

The room devoted to her “Curtains” from the 2000s perfectly illustrates this evolution. These painted curtains, inspired by the tasteless hangings that adorn popular interiors, transform the exhibition space into a contemporary Greek tragedy set. The viewer no longer contemplates the work, they evolve within González’s aesthetic.

The Melancholy of Assumed Kitsch

There is in Beatriz González a particular melancholy, that of one who fully accepts the aesthetic of her era without nostalgia for a bygone golden age. This acceptance resonates with the questions explored in contemporary Italian art, this way of transforming collective pain into artistic material without pathos.

The London exhibition reveals how this melancholy expresses itself through obsessive repetition. González tirelessly reprises the same motifs, the same figures, creating an accumulation effect that evokes both Andy Warhol and the votive altars of popular churches. This repetition becomes ritual, exorcism of a social violence that also reproduces itself mechanically.

Her latest works, presented in the final section of the exhibition, show an 82-year-old artist who has lost none of her capacity for subversion. Faced with triumphant digital art, she persists in painting by hand, claiming imperfection as the signature of the human. This persistence of manual gesture resonates deeply with my own nocturnal practice, this fidelity to the brush when everything pushes toward dematerialization.

The Barbican Reveals a Visionary

The Barbican retrospective ultimately reveals Beatriz González as a visionary who anticipated our era of visual saturation. By appropriating the codes of mass culture from the 1960s, she prefigures contemporary questions about the image and its circulation. Her work constitutes a lesson in visual ecology: how to recycle waste imagery to make it a radical artistic language.

The London installation, remarkably scenographed, allows us to grasp the scope of this aesthetic recycling enterprise. Each room reveals a facet of this particular alchemy that transforms visual waste into artistic gold. González teaches us that beauty is not found in the refinement of forms but in the intelligence of the gaze that knows how to see differently.

This exhibition arrives at the right moment in our era of questioning cultural legitimacy. Beatriz González demonstrates that there is no pre-established hierarchy between images, only more or less creative gazes to apprehend them. Her lesson resonates well beyond the Barbican’s walls: she invites us to reconsider our relationship to the images that surround us, no longer as passive consumers but as potential creators of meaning.

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